Ivan Klíma Quotes

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.

The world is like an enormous set of scales. When evil begins to outweigh good, angels cram themselves in on the lighter side. You can't see them, but there they are, restoring the balance.

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

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

To destroy is easier than to create, and that is why so many people are ready to demonstrate against what they reject. But what would they say if one asked them what they wanted instead?

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

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

A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.

Animals have one thing that puts them way ahead of people: they don't dissemble, and you don't have to pretend in front of them.

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

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

..the writer's obsession - the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.

The halcyon days of childhood, a time when everything lay open before him, when the most minor episodes could be construed as events and every chance encounter … gave rise to fresh insights.