Ivan Klima Quotes

It needs a lot of courage to admit to an action that one is ashamed of and knows to be wrong. One's reluctance to hurt someone else is just an excuse; in fact it is lack of courage.

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.

Paradise is, above all, the state in which the soul feels clean.

If you tell anything to a woman ... it's like putting it in the papers.

Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of.

I realised the amazing power of literature and of the human imagination generally: to make the dead live and to stop the living from dying.

Anyone longing to become a writer, for even a few moments of his life, will vainly weave fantastic events unless he has experienced that fall during which he doesn't know where or whether it will come to an end, and unless his longing for human contact awakens in him the strength to rise, purged, from the ashes.

Far better that false hope should lull you,
Than that sheer blackness yawn at you

Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.

Every few seconds a new book sees the light of day. Most of them will just be a part of the hum that makes us hard of hearing. Even the book is becoming an instrument of forgetting. A truly literary work comes into being as its creator's cry of protest against the forgetting that looms over him, over his predecessors and his contemporaries alike, and over his time, and the language he speaks. A literary work is something that defies death.

There is little that comes so close to death as fulfilled love.

Justice was revenge wrapping itself in a cloak of high principle.

My father also told me that people had always suffered from being tied to the ground, from not being able to detach themselves from it. But they had dreamed of leaving it, and so they had invented the garden of paradise, which had in it everything they yearned for but lacked in their lives, and they had dreamed up creatures similar to themselves but equipped with wings. But what in the past had only been dreamed of was now beginning to materialize, my father said, pointing to the sky. Angels did not exist, but people could now fly. There was no paradise for human souls to dwell in, but one day I would understand that it was more important for people to live well and happily here on earth.

If we lose our memory, we lose ourselves. Forgetting is one of the symptoms of death. Without memory we cease to be human beings.

Growing numbers of people, in their work, come into contact with a diminishing fragment of reality; as their world shrinks, so does their language.