I can be by myself because I’m never lonely; I’m simply alone, living in my heavily populated solitude, a harum-scarum of infinity and eternity, and Infinity and Eternity seem to take a liking to the likes of me. ― Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude. (Abacus May 27, 1993) Originally published 1976.
For where would we be If love were not stronger than poetry And poetry were not stronger than love? — Miroslav Holub, from “United Flight 1011,” We’ll Never Get Parts Like That Again (Carpe Diem, 2013)
And when a poet dies, deep in the night a lone black bird wakes up in the thicket and sings for all it’s worth — Miroslav Holub, from “Interferon,” Poems Before and After (Bloodaxe Books, 2006)
That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us. — Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. (Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (April 7, 1999)
