Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Milorad Pavic

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Serbian novelist Milorad Pavic.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
Milorad Pavic

Milorad Pavić was a Serbian novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary historian. Born in Belgrade in 1929, he published a number of poems, short stories and novels during his lifetime, the most famous of which was the Dictionary of the Khazars (1984). Upon its release, it was hailed as "the first novel of the 21st century." Pavić's works have been translated into more than thirty languages. He was vastly popular in Europe and in South America, and was deemed "one of the most intriguing writers from the beginning of the 21st century." He won numerous prizes in Serbia and in the former Yugoslavia, and was mentioned several times as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Belgrade in 2009.

And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago.
When we read, it is not ours to absorb all that is written. Our thoughts are jealous and they constantly blank out the thoughts of others, for there is not room enough in us for two scents at one time.
Unfortunate and wretched are those who have respected a book they did not love and hated those they did. — © Milorad Pavic
Unfortunate and wretched are those who have respected a book they did not love and hated those they did.
In the direction that your fear is growing, you're on the right path.
Houses are like books: so many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still.
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