Dita Kraus Quotes

You are what you dream,

The most beautiful flowers emerge from the foulest dung heap. So maybe, thinks Dita, God isn’t a watchmaker but a gardener.

Brave people are not the ones who aren't afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That's not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk-- whose legs shake, but carry on.

Life, any life, is very short. But if you’ve managed to be happy for at least an instant, it will have been worth living.

It was during one of her many sleepless nights that Dita came up with the idea of turning her memories into photos and her head into the only album that nobody would ever be able to take away from her.

those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature.

But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature.

If they lock you up in a lunatic asylum, the worst thing that can happen to you is that you’re sane.

Dita admits that sometimes her mother drives her mad—no matter how she’s feeling, Liesl always says she’s fine. How can Dita know the truth?

with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons:

Life, any life, is very short. But if you’ve managed to be happy for at least an instant, it will have been worth living.” “An instant! How short is that?” “Very short. It’s enough to be happy for as long as it takes a match to be lit and go out.” Dita is silent as she weighs up how many matches have been lit and gone out in her life—and there have been lots. Many brief moments in which a flame has shone, even in the midst of the deepest darkness. Some of those moments have occurred when, in the middle of some huge disaster, she has opened a book and buried herself in it. Her small library is a box of matches.

She pictures herself in early 1939, aged nine, standing in front of the astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Hall square. She’s sneaking a peek at the old skeleton. It keeps watch over the rooftops of the city with huge empty eye sockets. They’d told them at school that the clock was a piece of mechanical ingenuity, invented by Maestro Hanuš more than five hundred years ago. But Dita’s grandmothers told her a darker story. The king ordered Hanuš to construct a clock with figures, automatons that paraded on the stroke of every hour. When it was completed, the king ordered his bailiffs to blind the clockmaker so that he could never make another wonder like it. But the clockmaker took revenge, putting his hand into the mechanism to disable it. The cogs shredded his hand, the mechanism jammed, and the clock was broken, unfixable for years. Sometimes Dita had nightmares about that amputated hand snaking its way around the serrated wheels of the mechanism. Dita,

No longer do I wait till...till the war ends, till we are liberated, till I marry, till the child is born, till we have more money, till the school year ends, till peace comes...I need not delay anymore; I have caught up with my life.