Top 40 Bohumil Hrabal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I was always lucky in my bad luck.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

2. “To spend our days betting on three-legged horses with beautiful names.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

3. “I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

4. “I can be by myself because I’m never lonely, I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

5. “Doua lucruri imi stapanesc mintea, mereu si staruitor minunandu-ma: cerul instelat deasupra mea si legea morala in mine.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

6. “Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don’t know.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

7. “Until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude...”

— Bohumil Hrabal

8. “He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...”

— Bohumil Hrabal

9. “Because when I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqeur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

10. “As I helped him up, I felt him shake all over, so I asked him to forgive me, without knowing what for, but that was my lot, asking forgiveness, I even asked forgiveness of myself for being what I was, what it was my nature to be.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

11. “For we are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.” After.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

12. “No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

13. “And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time, like a black-smith’s bellows, like everything in my press, turning into its opposite at the command of the red and green buttons, and that’s what makes the world go round.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

14. “I cieli non sono umani e la vita sopra di me e sotto di me e dentro di me neppure.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

15. “It’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

16. “When I start reading I’m somewhere completely different, I’m in the text, it’s amazing, I have to admit I’ve been dreaming, dreaming in a land of great beauty, I’ve been in the very heart of truth. Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

17. “I expect them to tell me things about myself I don’t know...”

— Bohumil Hrabal

18. “Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go home.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

19. “It never ceased to amaze me, until suddenly one day I felt beautiful and holy for having had the courage to hold on to my sanity after all I’d seen and been through, body and soul, in too loud a solitude, and slowly I came to the realization that my work was hurtling me headlong into an infinite field of omnipotence.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

20. “The closest one person can get to another is through silence.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

21. “Not until we’re totally crushed do we show what we are made of.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

22. “For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe; living among people who will lay down their lives for a bale of compacted thoughts.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

23. “Somehow I had reached an age when being in love with a beautiful woman was beyond my reach because I was now bald and my face was full of wrinkles, yet the cats loved me the way girls used to love me when I was young.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

24. “You can’t rid yourself of freedom the way you’d rid yourself of lice, brother.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

25. “I no longer felt alone and it gave me, not strength, but a sweet sensation of happiness, though I knew sadness was lurking not far off, because all being arises from nonbeing, and everything that exists derives from its opposite.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

26. “Why does Lao-tze say that to be born is to exit and to die is to enter?”

— Bohumil Hrabal

27. “The heavens may be far from humane, but I’d had about all I could take. So.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

28. “Through the station went a goods train, spitting sparks from its chimney. Viktoria stood at the window and combed those sparks out of her hair.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

29. “Our heads met, our eyes crossed paths, the window to the courtyard lay open, I whispered in his ear and he started crying in my hair, wept like a child, I stroked him, touched by his crying, that he opened up, as he truly was, rent his shirt and exposed his heart like the paintings of Jesus hung over the beds in country houses.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

30. “Which must be why Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you’d forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your hadkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it’s meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author’s brains out.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

31. “I cannot live in the new time anyway, because I belong to the old time, which is dead.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

32. “So I walk home like a burning house, like a burning stable, the light of life pouring out of the fire, fire pouring out of the dying wood, hostile sorrow lingering under the ashes.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

33. “I have calmed down a little and my work is going better than yesterday, so well, in fact, that it does itself and I can slip back into the womb of time, into my youth, when I ironed my trousers and shined my shoes, soles included, every Saturday, because when you’re young you love keeping clean, you love your self-image, an image you still have time to improve.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

34. “Every beloved object is the center of a garden of paradise.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

35. “Trembling as usual, I dropped to one knee and, holding on to the drum with one hand, looked up, wondering what he, my boss, had against me, what made him pull such terrifying faces, faces so indignant, so full of suffering that they always made me believe that I was a repulsive person and a hopeless worker who inflicted the most ignoble blows on his noble superior.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

36. “Sometimes I felt so badly about those cats that I’d find myself wishing that both I and the cats could simply cease to exist.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

37. “I am a jug filled with water both magic and plain; I have only to lean over and a stream of beautiful thoughts flows out of me.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

38. “I will choose my own fall, which is ascension.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

39. “The heavens are not humane, but I’d forgotten compassion and love.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

40. “So there they stood, side by side, the better for me to compare them, an elderly gentleman and a young man, as thousands of cobalt-colored flies swooped in thousands of wild nosedives, their metallic wings and bodies embroidering an immense tableau vivant made up of constantly shifting curves and splashes like the flow of paint in those gigantic Jackson Pollocks.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

41. “A teardrop glittered like a diamond in the ring of her eye. When they’re at the bottom, people fill their eyes with beautiful things. The world is full of art, it’s just a matter of knowing how to look around you and then surrendering to inexhaustible whisperings, to small details, to longing and desire.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

42. “It is by and from books that I’ve learned that the heavens are not humane, neither the heavens nor any man with a head on his shoulders – it’s not that men don’t wish to be humane, it just goes against common sense.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

43. “She closed her eyes and pushed her head into the dog’s fur so she wouldn’t see what terrified her and filled her with longing at the same time.”

— Bohumil Hrabal

44. “Thus this book is an expression not only of my own evolution, but of a part of society’s evolution as well, a society I live in and that, like me, wishes to live in habitations where humor and the possibility of metaphysical escape reign supreme. BOHUMIL HRABAL, 1965.”

— Bohumil Hrabal