Top 35 Bruno Schulz Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “So, it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament.”

— Bruno Schulz

2. “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.”

— Bruno Schulz

3. “My ideal goal is to “mature” into childhood. That would be genuine maturity.”

— Bruno Schulz

4. “Reality is as thin as paper and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character.”

— Bruno Schulz

5. “Lifelessness is only a disguise behind which hide unknown forms of life.”

— Bruno Schulz

6. “An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.”

— Bruno Schulz

7. “Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.”

— Bruno Schulz

8. “In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.”

— Bruno Schulz

9. “And one’s wandering proved as sterile and pointless as the excitement produced by a close study of pornographic albums.”

— Bruno Schulz

10. “One thing must be avoided at all costs: narrow-mindedness, pedantry, dull pettiness.”

— Bruno Schulz

11. “Under the imaginary table that separates me from my readers, don’t we secretly clasp each other’s hands?”

— Bruno Schulz

12. “Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance.”

— Bruno Schulz

13. “As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.”

— Bruno Schulz

14. “Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold? Worried, we run along the train of events, preparing ourselves for the journey.”

— Bruno Schulz

15. “It is part of my existence to be the parasite of metaphors, so easily am I carried away by the first simile that comes along. Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return to my senses.”

— Bruno Schulz

16. “Yet what is to be done with events that have no place of their own in time; events that have occurred too late, after the whole of time has been distributed, divided, and allotted; events that have been left in the cold, unregistered, hanging in the air, homeless, and errant?”

— Bruno Schulz

17. “Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep. The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine.”

— Bruno Schulz

18. “If, forgetting the respect due to the Creator, I were to attempt a criticism of creation, I would say ‘Less matter, more form!”

— Bruno Schulz

19. “How can one not succumb and allow one’s courage to fail when everything is shut tight, when all meaningful things are walled up, and when you constantly knock against bricks, as against the walls of a prison?”

— Bruno Schulz

20. “The books we read in childhood don’t exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind. Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them.”

— Bruno Schulz

21. “There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One’s imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night.”

— Bruno Schulz

22. “For ordinary books are like meteors. Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes. With bitter resignation we sometimes wander late at night through the extinct pages that tell their stone dead messages like wooden rosary beads.”

— Bruno Schulz

23. “Homicide is not a sin. It is sometimes a necessary violence on resistant and ossified forms of existence which have ceased to be amusing. In the interests of an important and fascinating experiment, it can even become meritorious. Here is the starting point of a new apologia for sadism.”

— Bruno Schulz

24. “They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them.”

— Bruno Schulz

25. “Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness.”

— Bruno Schulz

26. “On that night the sky laid bare its internal construction in many sections which, like quasi-anatomical exhibits, showed the spirals and whorls of light, the pale-green solids of darkness, the plasma of space, the tissue of dreams.”

— Bruno Schulz

27. “This enraged the other Nazi so much that the next morning he came to our house and he shot my father.”

— Bruno Schulz

28. “I harbored in my mind a sort of utopia about ‘an age of genius’ that supposedly existed in my life once upon a time, not in any calendar year but on a level above chronology, an age when everything blazed with godly colors and one took in the whole sky with a single breath, like a gulp of pure ultramarine.”

— Bruno Schulz

29. “Matter is the most passive and most defenseless essence in cosmos. Anyone can mold it and shape it; it obeys everybody. All attempts at organizing matter are transient and temporary, easy to reverse and to dissolve. There is no evil in reducing life to other and newer forms. Homicide is not a sin.”

— Bruno Schulz

30. “Beds unmade for days on end, piled high with bedding crumpled and disordered from the weight of dreams, stood like deep boats waiting to sail into the dank and confusing labyrinths of some dark starless Venice.”

— Bruno Schulz

31. “I am sorry,” he would say, addressing himself unexpectedly to the astonished onlooker. “I am sorry, I am concerned with that section of space which you are filling. Couldn’t you move a little to one side for a minute?”

— Bruno Schulz

32. “Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes.”

— Bruno Schulz

33. “The horse was panting, hanging its head. I hugged its head to my breast and saw that there were tears in its large eyes. I noticed a round black wound on its belly. “Why did not you tell me?” I whispered, crying. “My dearest, I did it for you,” the horse said and became very small, like a wooden toy. I left him and felt wonderfully light and happy.”

— Bruno Schulz

34. “They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies.”

— Bruno Schulz

35. “But in vain did he apostrophize the insect in this new language, born of sudden inspiration, as a cockroach’s understanding is not equal to such a tirade: the insect continued on its journey to a corner of the room, with movements sanctified by an ageless ritual of the cockroach world.”

— Bruno Schulz

36. “Can there be anything sadder than a human being changed into the rubber tube of an enema?”

— Bruno Schulz

37. “During the period of the shortest, sleepy days of winter that are demarcated from morning and evening on both sides by furry edges of twilight, when the city branches out ever more deeply into the labyrinths of the winter nights and is summoned back by a brief dawn to reflection, to a return home, my father was already lost, sold, sworn to that other sphere.”

— Bruno Schulz

38. “Charles yawned out of his body, out of the depth of all its cavities the remains of yesterday. The yawning was convulsive as if his body wanted to turn itself inside out. In this way he got rid of the sand and ballast, the undigested remains of the previous day.”

— Bruno Schulz

39. “One imagined these barrel organs, beautifully painted, carried on the backs of little grey old men, whose indistinct faces, corroded by life, seemed covered by cobwebs – faces with watery, immobile eyes slowly leaking away, emaciated faces as discoloured and innocent as the cracked and weathered bark of trees, and now like bark smelling only of rain and sky.”

— Bruno Schulz