Bruno Schulz quotes
Bruno Schulz was a Polish-Jewish writer, fine artist, and literary critic, renowned for his surreal short stories and distinctive style. His most famous works, such as "The Street of Crocodiles", blend autobiography with myth and dreamlike imagery. He influenced generations of writers and artists with his imaginative vision and tragic life. Here are 37 of his quotes:
Has our reader ever heard about the parallel strands of time, in two-track time? Yes, such branch stretches of time do exist, a little illegal, to be sure, and problematic, but when carrying such contraband as ours, such supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one cannot be too particular. And so, at some point in our story, we shall attempt to take such a branch turning, a siding, and shunt this illegal history into it.
Bruno Schulz
It is worth noting how, in coming into contact with that unusual man, all things withdrew, as it were, to the root of their being, rebuilt their phenomenon down to its metaphysical core. They returned to their primordial idea, only to betray it at that point and lurch into those dubious, daring, and equivocal regions which I shall here succinctly call, the Regions of the Great Heresy.
Bruno Schulz
Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he gave single-handed battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Bereft of all support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wondrous mill, into whose hoppers the bran of the empty hours was poured, bursting into bloom in its mechanism with all of the colours and aromas of oriental spices.
Bruno Schulz
For ordinary books are like meteors; each has its moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air, like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. For that moment, that single instant, we love them; although they are mere ashes by then. Sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they go on insisting, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ.
Bruno Schulz
Ah! And in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales of my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that, someday, they will strike root imperceptibly between the faded leaves of that most magnificent, scattering book; that they will fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?
Bruno Schulz
Mother held no influence over [my father]; though he bestowed much reverence and attention upon Adela. When she swept his chamber, it was to him a great and momentous ceremony, one that he never omitted to witness, following Adela's every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed to her every action some deeper, symbolic meaning, and when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance.
Bruno Schulz
I have never seen the Old Testament prophets, but at the sight of that man floored by divine anger, widely straddling his enormous porcelain urinal and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions, above which his voice rose still higher, alien and hard-I came to understand the divine anger of holy men.
Bruno Schulz
Too long,” said my father, "have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. Too long has the perfection of his handiwork paralysed our own creativity. We do not wish to compete with him. We have no ambition to rival him. We wish merely to be creators in our own, lower sphere. We crave creativity for ourselves. We crave the joy of creation. In a word, we crave Demiurgy.
Bruno Schulz
All springs begin in this way, from those enormous and astounding horoscopes, each beyond the scale of a single season of the year. And in each one-be it nevermore said, let me say it here-there is everything: endless processions and demonstrations, revolutions and barricades. And through them all at a certain moment, the hot wind of remembrance blows, that boundlessness of sadness and intoxication seeking in vain its counterpart in reality.
Bruno Schulz
"Were I to cast aside respect before the Creator and seek to make a jest in criticism of creation, then I should demand, ‘Less content and more form!' Oh, how that loss of content would unburden the world! More modesty in purposes, more restraint in claims, gentlemen demiurges, and the world would be more exquisite!” cried my father as his hands were laying bare Paulina's white calf from the fetters of her stocking.
Bruno Schulz
The moon was still high. The sky's transformations-the metamorphoses of its multitudinous vaults in ever more masterfully described configurations-were unending. Like a silver astrolabe, the sky had opened up that night its bewitching internal mechanism, exhibiting in endless cycles the gilded mathematics of its cogs and wheels.
Bruno Schulz
In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother at the mercy of the summer days, white from the heat and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through that great book of the holiday, in which the pages were ablaze with splendour, their sickly sweet pulp, deep within, made from golden pears.
Bruno Schulz
Sometimes, a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, in accumulations of clouds encircled by redness at their edges, luminously and chromatically, breaking off at every edge. People go about stupefied by the light, their eyes closed, exploding inwardly with rockets, Roman candles and powder-kegs. But later, toward evening, that hurricane fire of light softens. The horizon grows rotund, beautiful, and full of azure, like a glass ball in a garden with its miniature and illuminated panorama of the world, in a happily ordered composition, above which the clouds are arranged, its conclusive toppings, unfolding in a long row like rouleaux of golden medals, or peals of bells combining in rosy litanies.
Bruno Schulz
Everybody knows that, in the course of mundane and ordinary years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years, odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up; spurious, we say; for seldom will it grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development, a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real.
Bruno Schulz
filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, which remained black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics-charred-black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale-black pipes of the Devil's organs.
Bruno Schulz