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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"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."
"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."
"Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it."
"A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm."
"To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."
"The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."
"Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass."
"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."
"I rarely do masks because, if I have any extra time, I'd rather spend it with my friends than on myself."
"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."
"Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another."
"Many of us who have experienced psychedelics feel very much that they are sacred tools. They open spiritual awareness."
"He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street."
"I never intended to be a politician or office-seeker."
"I tell you, in my opinion, the cornerstone of democracy is free press - that's the cornerstone."
"You still stand watch, O human star, burning without a flicker, perfect flame, bright and resourceful spirit. Each of your rays a great idea - O torch which passes from hand to hand, from age to age, world without end."
"If I'm on location on some island, we usually get up at four in the morning to set up. By seven thirty, we're on the beach working until noon, then we rest. It's not exactly a vacation."
"I read Freud's Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in basically one sitting. I decided to enroll in medical school. It was almost like a conversion experience."
"...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love."
"Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents."
"When I was 4 my mother got divorced and we were very close to each other. I always wanted to be with her. She took me everywhere. When she went for dinner with friends or when they had meetings at the tennis club, I was always there."
"I was paid to read Western economic texts. In a way, the regime paid for their own undermining."
"My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity, but they have no soul."
"We're constantly buying airplane tickets; we travel on the Concorde."
"It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made."
"I would like to see it go back to the wood racquets. To see the touch put back in tennis."
"So, thanks God, our films, our first films were suddenly being appreciated by the Western media; especially France was very good, and Switzerland was very good."
"An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type."
"You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices."
"I spent much of my later childhood and adolescence very, very involved and interested in art, and particularly in animated movies."
"We are very isolated, far from boyfriends and friends, so we have to be strong, smart and very professional."
"Well, I wouldn't say that this experience had any influence on my decision to do this film about Andy, because Andy was apolitical. Andy was never political."
"For any culture which is primarily concerned with meaning, the study of death - the only certainty that life holds for us - must be central, for an understanding of death is the key to liberation in life."
"When I came for the first time to the United States, visiting, I was absolutely fascinated by New York."
"I was maybe only 13 or 14 when I started to play junior tournaments."
"Otherwise, I spend a lot of time at my boyfriend's home in the country, in New Jersey."
"What drove such people to their sinister occupations? Spite? Certainly, but also the desire for order. Because the desire for order tries to transform the human world into an inorganic reign in which everything goes well, everything functions as a subject of an impersonal will. The desire for order is at the same time a desire for death, because life is a perpetual violation of order. Or, inversely, the desire for order is a virtuous pretext by which man's hatred for man justifies its crimes."
"The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry."
"I especially love French, Italian and Japanese cuisines."
"I just wanted to play tennis. I started because I wanted to pick up another sport and then as I was slowly getting better I wanted to see how far I can go but I always wanted to be myself. I wanted to be original. I didn't want to copy anybody's style."
"For the first time in his life, sex is located away from all danger, away from conflict and drama, away from persecution, away from any accusation, away from worries; he has nothing to take care of, love is taking care of him, love as he's always wanted it and never had it: love-repose; love-oblivion; love-desertion; love-carefreeness; love-meaningless."
"Great God of the Ants, thou hast granted victory to thy servants. I appoint thee honorary Colonel."
"As long as I had easy access to psychedelics at the government-sponsored research project, most of my energy went into psychedelic sessions."
"Mother belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away."
"In the first day of the Soviet Army's arrival, I and the other comrades were isolated and then found ourselves here, not knowing anything... I can only conjecture what could have happened."
"Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth."
"I think it was the right time for me to retire because nowadays tennis is too incredibly fast and you can say that my style tennis went out of fashion."
"In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
"I put my money in the bank: I have to think of life after modeling, when I'm not famous any more."
"If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect."
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