Josef Čapek

“ In the garden, the half-open roses offer a caress. Flowers of the summertime and of joy are all a-bloom. Severus comes back into the house. Beside him walks Edith. Still does he possess her smile, her voice, her love. ”

“ One cannot live unless he eats!
It isn’t always true, that. Some people prefer to leave the bread and butter and depend upon love. A fine and rare thing, love, the most powerful force in the world, and sometimes the only thing in the universe that counts. The love of lovers is sweet indeed. I know nothing about the love that exists between friends, but I am sure that the tenderest love of all is the love between husband and wife.
When Severus was still only a student, he appeared to have no special qualities at all. ”

“ Scattered are now the graves of Itherene, whose name it were better not to speak aloud, but to whisper only with a tongue weighted with grains of wheat, for men must ever dread the divine curse hanging over him who traffics in blood. ”

“ Here, in the foundations of the dwellings, one may learn of a rich patrimony of secret history, establishing the existence, anciently, of a race living beneath the surface of the earth and coming out from their habitation when the world was created. This noble race emerged from the soil as did the ancient Buffalo, the great ancestor of those numberless animals which have fallen beneath the spears of the ancient, audacious hunters. ”

“ Severus is always safe, death never threatens him, on those travels of his. He is bold, and he will never be sacrificed upon the dark soil which yields its secrets to his searching mind. That soil knows that Severus is no stranger, knows that Severus is its loving friend. ”

“ It is also an unquestionable fact that the soldiers of numberless armies, leaving for the front to encounter incredible sufferings, have been loved, every one, by some human soul. And from the vast assembly of human hearts who thus loved them has arisen to the skies, as it were, an immense cloud made up of prayers and wailing. ”

“ Who will ever untangle its mysteries, that tongue so full of gossip and chatter, that speech which so jealously guards all it knows of our remote ancestry and which bestows upon humanity a heritage which must be preserved in divine silence? ”

“ This time, though, perhaps another woman is speaking, for, close beside our first group, there is another man who is clasping to his face another child, after having deposited, like the first man, a lunch-basket upon the ground. Still another meal is growing cold, and a third wife is looking on as a third husband presses a third child to his cheek. Like others, this woman also is at a loss to decide which one she loves the more dearly—her husband, or the child who is nipping his father’s ear with his little teeth. ”

“ I really suffer at being obliged to leave these places, full of joy and happiness, to return to countries of sadness and poverty, where life is only a wornout discipline and habitude, wholly automatic, where art is withering, where science, reduced to lifeless formulas, is drying up, and where, under the guise of policies and parties, everything has fallen to the ground. ”

“ Their cities have been devastated, their tombs and graves have been effaced and leveled, their ashes have been thrown to the winds, and what remains to tell us of these our ancestors of the ancient world? ”