Quotes by Bulgarian Authors

A human rights activist is the worst type of person to mess with. If I can choose an enemy between the worst finance CEO, or the worst human rights violating dictator, and a human rights activist, I would choose the former. A human rights activist doesn't let go; doesn't have a peace of mind till responsibility for a wrongful act is finally reached. That's the uncomfortable type of person that cannot stand injustice, the type of person that doesn't fear "social desirability" sanctions for confronting wrongdoers directly, upsetting the silence and the status quo, and for screaming loud. That's the person that dares to stand up -- for themselves, for others. That's the type of person who doesn't lay low, doesn't fear being perceived as uncomfortable, the type of person that doesn't just "go along". I do not want as an enemy a person who cannot let go and forget injustice, but who instead will plug away till the very end, till justice is reached. I do not want that man or woman as an enemy.
Iveta Cherneva
I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff
Usually it`s like this: I sit down and drink with the idea of clarifying just where I am going with my life, and then, after a while, I am unable even to stand on my feet
Plamen Chetelyazov
Real love is the shared loneliness".
Alexandar Tomov
The first domesticated animal was the scapegoat.
Yanko Tsvetkov
Having love and not giving it is just as difficult as not having love and needing it
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
At this point, the jealousy that tortured me all my life commenced, and the force with which it came over me marked me forever. It became my true passion, utterly heedless of any attempts at convincing me or pointing out a better way.
Elias Canetti
What does jealousy indicate? Jealousy is love manifested in the physical world. If you are jealous you have a debt to pay; if someone is jealous of you, he has a debt to pay to you.
Petar Dunov
What sort of love is permeated by jealousy? You are jealous because you are unaware that everything you need is inside you.
Petar Dunov
When life gets you down, improvise as if crawling was part of the choreography.
Iveta Cherneva
She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
For the longest time I couldn't understand the meaning of the cliche "being compatible" - whether about a lover, colleague, team mate or friend. I now get it. There is so much more behind this superficial nauseatingly-pragmatic diplomatic phrase -- it goes deep down to the true essence of someone, how they see the world, how they see and position themselves, how prepared/capable they are to back you, whether they can understand who you are and if they are prepared to break walls for you. Anything else is details.
Iveta Cherneva
...what exactly is there in human existence that can lure you away from pleasure: peace of mind, a walk by the sea, moderation?
Kapka Kassabova
How you live does not depend so much on what life brings you as on the attitude that you approach your life with.
Ivinela Samuilova
Dependence on drugs is not a disease, it is not a virus, it is not something that stalks only the dregs of society. Drug addiction is REALIZED EMOTIONAL DEFICIENCY SYNDROME.
Plamen Chetelyazov
Most people are dependent on legal drugs but this is somehow not an obstacle to seeing an enemy in every underground addict.
Plamen Chetelyazov
Writing to impress others is the surest path to pretentious mediocrity.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Two things you should never do in a hurry: make up and revenge.
Iveta Cherneva
The Four Stages of Writer’s BlockW.B. Stage I: I want to write but I can’t.W.B. Stage II: I have to write but I can’t. W.B. Stage I: I don’t want to write but I have to.W.B. Stage I: I don’t have time for writing … and, honestly, I don’t feel like writing.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Now we go in and take over," answered A. "It's our duty to help these people.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Being safe doesn't mean you won't be sorry.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I can be anything – and nothing, and everything at the same time. It all depends on the role I am in.
Simona Panova
Technology innovation for the sake of innovation is an empty shell if we focus on what people don't need but would buy anyways.
Iveta Cherneva
A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
Elias Canetti
Be nice to your children. They may grow up to be writers.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The earliest childhood memories are woven by shadows. And some of these shadows are woven from fire.
Plamen Chetelyazov
Why is it that places thousands of miles from my childhood village home send me back, opening the sluice-gates of the past? Well, we are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhoods. It may be, then, that the natural place to meet ourselves as children is 'abroad', and that includes the foreign country of our growing up and aging. So it is that the personal, physical feeling of departure from the time of childhood may merge in a special symbiosis with geographical departure, biography and geography resonating now on a single wavelength.
Georgi Gospodinov
Quote from "A la bulgaro":"So long time has passed since those days, and since that story, which is still vivid in my memory, and even more vivid than all the rest. Some times I stay alone in my work - room here, in my father's old mansion in Pasadena, and I look through the old, yellow pages again and again. Then I go back to the north part which is furnished in my style, with many colored Bulgarian carpets and blankets (special kind of Bulgarian blankets with long fur), I make my coffee in a cooper coffee - pot, which has been brought from there, and my thoughts wonder to those absurd memories of mine...Very often some friends ask me - what is that unusual memories of yours? I can't explain to them, better say I don't want to, and I always avoid the answer by saying - a la Bulgaro - in a Bulgarian way..."Oh, yes, yes"...
Alexandar Tomov
I don't know why people are so shy about expressing openly in front of the world their longing for each other, the most powerful and tender natural attraction, but they pretend to be proud or indifferent and they don't consider, especially if they're young, that the sands of our life have been measured by God unto the last grain and that every carelessly wasted second of love sinks irreversibly into eternity.
Angel Wagenstein
Youth is feeling seventy years old, misanthropic, and ready to die at fifteen
Nikolai Grozni
Not only must the most privileged feel they are brothers and sisters of the most destitute, but the most destitute must feel as well that something within them makes them equal to the greatest sages and geniuses.
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Because if we were all created idealists, then life was bound to be one relentless disappointment. But then, there was also music. We unlearned the lies with one hand and repeated them with the other.
Nikolai Grozni
The junkie ignites his feelings with ugly synthetic substances, and the emotions that were meant to last for a lifetime burn away in full force in a couple of short years.
Plamen Chetelyazov
perhaps like me she's vainly hopingand some news awaits,but the moist earth already holds himin her strong embrace...
Nikola Vaptsarov
Often I Wish I Werea potato.Eyes openedin all directions.Unafraid of the cold earth.The differencebetween life and deathfor somebody.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Perfect...as it was, it had to be, andlittle dreams were spinning madlyas a flock of birds in mid-flight, thesingle vision of a single moment, a singlemoment, frozen in time no more. No moredid he need, to understand thatit was better than any he couldtake, and call his own, it was Perfect...
Stefan G. Dimov
Your fear is a blessing. It is giving you an opportunity to disidentify from your mind and learn to trust the unknown. The mind can never trust or surrender. Trust always happens through intelligence and consciousness. The mind always asks for guarantees, but life never offers any. Life unfolds moment to moment, and each moment arises as a result of the moment that was surrendered before it. Life is a surprise that always arises out of the unknown. You can either embrace the unknown and live it fully and joyously, or resist it and live in pain, fear, and struggle.
Mada Eliza Dalian
People and situations always show us what we need to see and learn about ourselves, and when we take responsibility for our own feelings, how others treat us also changes. Everything in life is there to teach us something about ourselves. Don’t blame others, or try to separate yourself from them. Be grateful that they are helping you to become conscious of yourself and your own ego-mind an consciousness.
Mada Eliza Dalian
In life, every experience of a peak always follows the experience of a valley and we go back and forth between them. […] Until you understand that both the peaks and the valleys are inevitable and will eventually pass, and you disidentify from both sides, you will miss seeing your unmoving center, which is untouched by your thoughts, feelings or experiences.
Mada Eliza Dalian
His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.
Elias Canetti
The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.
Elias Canetti
I lie more convincingly than I tell the truth.
Simona Panova
Poetry is a connection to a change within you.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I was recently living more comfortably surrounded by secrets... Like dozens of luxurious satiny pillows, they were embracing me from all directions into safe lulling warmth, thus isolating me from the sharp dead-cold edges of the truth hiding behind their endearingly smooth textures and tender soothing colours.Secrets could be so irresistibly beautiful...
Simona Panova
The utter unbroken silence was more appalling than any ominous noise, than the loudest yells of anguish, than the most piercing screaming...Dead silence.Literally dead.
Simona Panova
I was beginning to agree with the thesis that some truths were better off dead.And buried.
Simona Panova
His character would be blamed, loathed, discussed, and adored – but somewhere there, behind his mask of a hero, Cardew would remain faceless.Anonymous.
Simona Panova
The desperate piercing scream of horror echoed far above the sharpened tops of the trees wrapped in thin obsidian-transparent mist, and I startled jerkily, tripping again, and almost collapsed onto the cold moist ground.
Simona Panova
And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...
Simona Panova
Gray.The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usually, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes; each tiny drop of hazy rain drifting around resembled transparent molten steel, the pavement looked like it was about to burst into disconsolate tears, even the air itself was gray, so ultimate and ubiquitous that colour was everywhere around me.Gray...
Simona Panova
Unfortunately, nothing can protect you from the thoughts in your own head.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.
Elias Canetti
Quote from “Unexpected Tales from the Ends of the Earth”: “This is that old well known man, for who I understood that one morning he puts the pistol in his mouth and put the trigger. He is dead right here. But he would never die in that dream. And I will never stop ask myself why I woke up, and how exactly has finished “This is that old well known man, for who I understood that one morning he puts the pistol in his mouth and put the trigger. He is dead right here. But he would never die in that dream. And I will never stop ask myself why I woke up, and how exactly has finished the strange feast”.
Alexandar Tomov
The unknown grayish mystifying forest was benumbed into frost-covered cold, and the tremendous pines towering above the dark marshy soil resembled a gathering of severe mute brothers from a forbidden ancient order worshiping forgotten gods no one had ever heard of outside of the world of secret occult visions.
Simona Panova
The person in love finds only a dream, a notion, an ideal. You fall in love with nothing but your own dreams—the only carriers of your true longings. Sometimes you manage to personify your dreams in another. Sometimes it’s not a single-player game. This doesn’t make love any less primal or selfish.
Plamen Chetelyazov
At home in the nursery, I usually played alone. Actually, I seldom played, I spoke to the wallpaper. The many dark circles in the pattern of the wallpaper seemed like people to me. I made up stories in which they appeared, either I told them the stories or they played with me, I never got tired of the wallpaper people and I could talk to them for hours.
Elias Canetti
Paranoia. The more you think of an imaginary problem, the more you feel as though it’s real –
Simona Panova
I am going to add a cold beer. Why not a bottle of whiskey? Because my story is cheap and cannot afford such props. Goddamn, even my imagination is not wealthy enough to order a bottle of Jack!
Plamen Chetelyazov
When we find the crossing point between our attitude and what happens in our life, then we change ordinary life into a miraculous adventure.
Ivinela Samuilova