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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"If I don't practice the way I should, then I won't play the way that I know I can."
"Whether they knew of didn't know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn't know. (...) by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, "My conscience is clear! I did not know! I was a believer!" Isn't his "I did not know I was a believer!" at the very root of his irreparable guilt?"
"Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures."
"Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for... with the hope for this little twig."
"The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal."
"Because if you lived, as I did, several years under Nazi totalitarianism, and then 20 years in communist totalitarianism, you would certainly realize how precious freedom is, and how easy it is to lose your freedom."
"But I also like to shower my parents with presents. I bought them a beautiful car and a house."
"Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude."
"No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women."
"Unfortunately, modeling takes you with no transition from being a girl to being a business woman."
"An old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past."
"And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors."
"That's one of the reasons I moved to Florida. Of course, the main reason is the weather and the training. But there's more jealousy in Switzerland because it's so little and they don't have so many athletes."
"First of all, whoever didn't want to be a member of this association or the other association, was branded, you know, like a dangerous individualist, you know, infected by the Western decadence, you know. So everybody joined."
"Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal."
"I grew up on the tennis court with lots of other kids. There were like 40 kids all afternoon and I was one of the youngest ones, so I always had to chase everybody to keep up."
"The beliefs concerning reincarnation have great ethical impact on human life and our relationship to the world."
"Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness."
"We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously."
"You know, 20 years... the films of television when it started, the literature, radio in communist countries, they're clean as a whistle; there was no violence, no sex, no drugs, nothing."
"For us she is not the iron lady. She is the kind, dear Mrs. Thatcher."
"My mother's a secretary; my father's an electrician in a mining company."
"Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything."
"If you go to school and practice for five days a week, it still gives you two days you can go and see your friends, you can go to the movies, you do whatever you like to do."
"If dogs could talk, perhaps we would find it as hard to get along with them as we do with people."
"Otherwise, I spend a lot of time at my boyfriend's home in the country, in New Jersey."
"Memories are doing funny things to us."
"Miles Davis had me play and he hired me the following week and after that, everything broke wide open."
"Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. Do not spare the men. Do not spare the women. Preserve only the factories, railroads, machines, mines, and raw materials. Destroy everything else. Then return to work. Work must not cease."
"I hope to continue building my acting career and work more on projects that fulfill my artistic thirst."
"I certainly don't know if you could claim that every theft is wrong, but I'll prove to you that every theft is forbidden, by simply locking you up."
"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray."
"That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke."
"Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles."
"If one can stick to the training throughout the many long years, then will power is no longer a problem. It's raining? That doesn't matter. I am tired? That's besides the point. It's simply that I just have to."
"I get out of the taxi and it's probably the only city which in reality looks better than on the postcards, New York."
"I have to say I regretted giving up animated movies."
"There is nothing harder to explain than humor."
"Consciousness after death demonstrates the possibility of consciousness operating independently of the body."
"Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary."
"According to materialistic science, any memory requires a material substrate, such as the neuronal network in the brain or the DNA molecules of the genes."
"Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all."
"It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends."
"Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'?"
"My acting coach makes the impossible accessible."
"Now, after the communist take-over in 1948, the amount of feature films produced dwindled to three a year, while the school was, you know, every year another three, four, five students."
"I have just come from the castle, where I have seen the president of the republic, and I can tell you that he has accepted all of my proposals without making any changes."
"I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining."
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