Top 15 Quotes & Sayings by Ivan Klíma

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

Graveyards remind us of the vanity of all human endeavour.

Most people can't imagine a life that is any different from the one they are actually living. They can dream about it, they can even go into the streets and demonstrate for it, but they still can't imagine what it would be like.

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