Czech Literature Quotes

“Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“A person's destiny often ends before his death.”
― Milan Kundera, The Joke

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Bonifác Strumm nevěřil přespříliš v boha, neviděl ho v sobě ani v jiných. V Satana věřil spíše; připadal mu pravděpodobnější.”
― Viktor Dyk

“The tree of possibilities: life as it reveals itself to a man arriving, astonished, at the threshold of his adult life: an abundant treetop canopy filled with bees singing. And he thinks he understands why she never showed him the letters: she wanted to hear the murmur of the tree by herself, without him, because he, Jean-Marc, represented the abolition of all possibilities, he was the reduction, (even though it was a happy reduction) of her life to a single possibility.”
― Milan Kundera

“Nejmenuji se; jsem nikdo. Jsem hůř než nikdo, jsem krysař.”
― Viktor Dyk, Krysař

“Krysař může mnoho. Může vyvésti krysy a může vylidniti města. Nemůže však zadržeti čas.”
― Viktor Dyk

“I cieli non sono umani e la vita sopra di me e sotto di me e dentro di me neppure.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude

“If there ever was a man of whom it could be said that he ‘hungered and thirsted after righteousness,’ it was Kafka.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Cerurile nu sunt umane, dar există ceva mai uman decât cerurile, compătimirea și dragostea, pe care le-am uitat și le-am rătăcit.”
― Hrabal, Bohumil

“I have a habit, before leaving my flat in Prague, of checking three times to make sure I’ve shut off the gas stove, that I’ve turned off the lights in the bathroom and the water closet, and that I’ve locked the door, and then I go back once more to check on everything a fourth time, and so now, though I knew that nothing but my swan could possibly be lying there under the snow, I still brushed the snow away with trembling hands and saw the curve of her wing, and I went on brushing the snow away and yes, there was her neck, then I elbowed my way back like a sloth, and now nothing ached anymore but my heart, and so I crawled back from the riverbank to the swan again, and then again, trying to brush away more and more snow from that beautiful snowbound creature who, perhaps for my sake alone, had arranged herself in my sight so that I cried out into the dark morning and realized, bitterly, that the king of Czech comedians could go to claim his advance for this story, not to the Writers’ Publishing House, but to the very center, not of death, but of hell itself, where I will suffer pangs of guilt and remorse and shame that will pursue me into eternity, into the very heart of incalculable consequences.”
― Bohumil Hrabal, All My Cats

“[...]
And Faust knows
that he will not speak of it,
and if so only by a comma,
only by a word in a big new book.
It is really something like
a coat of grey fur over the soul,
like the uniform the unknown soldier
wears inside him.
And so he goes and starts a painting,
or a gay little song,
or a big new book.
Nothing has happened but we
always saw if coming
All in all India ink
is the blood's first sister
and song is just as final
as life and death
and equally without allegory,
without transcendence
and without fuss.”
― Miroslav Holub, Selected Poems