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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power."
"Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable."
"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."
"Agnes subtracts from her self everything that is exterior and borrowed, in order to come closer to her sheer essence (even with the risk that zero lurks at the bottom of the subtraction). Laura's method is precisely the opposite: in order to make her self ever more visible, perceivable, seizable, sizeable, she keeps adding to it more and more attributes and she attempts to identify herself with them (with the risk that the essence of the self may be buried by the additional attributes)."
"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them, I have nothing in common with them."
"Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
"Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand."
"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
"Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it."
"I've always had the sense that my life is run by other people. Except for a few years after Martin died. Those were the toughest years, I was alone with my children, I had to cope by myself. Complete poverty. You won't believe this, but nowadays when I look back, those are my happiest years."
"Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously."
"The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded."
"For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'Aatre of the art of the novel."
"When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?"
"Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death."
"She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive."
"They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live."
"The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers."
"The situation is very slightly solemn and thus embarrassing, as are all such situations when after the initial lovemaking, the lovers confront a future they are suddenly required to take on."
"The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe."
"As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
"You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."
"Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth."
"Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible."
"For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?"
"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."
"(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations."
"Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten."
"He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears. He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly filled her with sadness. She felt sad that he loved her so much, and she felt like crying."
"He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library."
"All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests."
"Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can't rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
"How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?"
"Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness."
"Optimism is the opium of the people."
"Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul, the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."
"Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?"
"Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace."
"After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality."
"Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs."
"Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms ."
"Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."
"I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you."
"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
"Revolution in Love'. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?"
"It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas."
"She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
"Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know... The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it."
"People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all."
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