"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 was a Polish Jewish writer, artist, literary critic and art teacher. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works were lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Mess
"He occasionally placed two chairs back-to-back, and, supporting himself with his hands on the backrests, swung his legs back and forth, his radiant eyes searching our faces for looks of admiration and encouragement. It seemed he had become entirely reconciled with God."
"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."
"Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, tipping from her basket the colourful beauty of the sun: glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skins, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed that which would be realised in their taste, and apricots, in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons."
"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."
"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?"
"Adela’s outstretched slipper shook slightly and shone like a snake’s tongue."