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Quotes by Czechoslovakian Authors
"The novel is born not of the theoretical spirit but of the spirit of humor."
"Many cultures have independently developed a belief system in reincarnation that includes return of the unit of consciousness to another physical lifetime on Earth."
"A number of cases have been reported in which a dying individual has a vision of a person about whose death he or she did not know."
"Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion."
"First of all, to defend my work, I had to believe that I am doing a totally silly, stupid, innocent comedy."
"I'm lucky, I can sleep from takeoff until we land; so I'm fresh, rested and ready to work on arrival."
"I can only say, think of me what you will, I have worked for thirty years in the Party, and my whole family has devoted everything to the affairs of the Party, the affairs of socialism."
"Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious."
"I also helped write the five-page statement of principles that Civic Forum issued in late November. That was the first public expression of what the new government wanted to do."
"I just travel all the time. And I was just looking at the schedules now and starting the first week of October I will be every weekend with somebody at tournaments through Christmas. So it gets very difficult to just go away and not do that."
"I talk to Simon, I write to him. I never used to write a diary. But now I'm writing a diary to him. I think it's not just me, but lots of others, family and friends, can still feel him around."
"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
"There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone, without exception, has weaknesses."
"My goal was to play in the NHL, because that is the best hockey in the world."
"Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's."
"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."
"A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with cleanunderwear-instead of being allowed to pursue something higher -stores up greatreserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over theirbooks. (...) The difference between the universitygraduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in theextent of vitality and self-confidence. The elan with which Tereza flung herself into hernew Prague existence was both frenzied and precarious. She seemed to be expectingsomeone to come up to her any day and say, What are you doing here? Go back whereyou belong!"
"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."
"The top players talk more now, and we have more meetings. We're just trying to get things better. But we still need somebody who could make a difference."
"I do pottery. I love it. It's very relaxing; it takes me to another planet."
"Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia."
"No, because I think I have a reason to believe in myself and I think I'm also pretty confident about who I am and what I'm doing and it might be because I'm still at the top too."
"My boyfriend thinks I lost my true calling to be a librarian."
"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."
"Each of us can manifest the properties of a field of consciousness that transcends space, time, and linear causality."
"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."
"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."
"In Irena's head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears."
"Since we humans have the better brain, isn't it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?"
"O God and Lord, now the council condemns even Your own act and Your own law as heresy, since You Yourself did lay Your cause before Your Father as the just judge, as an example for us, whenever we are sorely oppressed."
"Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs."
"I started when I was 8 years old, which is obviously nowadays pretty late, but I guess in my generation it was all right. I had plenty of other interests and I didn't do only tennis."
"If we can make some kind of adjustments, maybe in the game, to make it interesting and slow down the surfaces, then it will be more fun and more interesting."
"For what is love if one loves a woman without knowing her? Just a decision to love? Or even an imitation? The question concerns us all: If, from our childhood on, the examples of love were not there inviting us to copy them, would we know what "loving" means?"
"It was wonderful to play such a part, but I was disappointed with the picture."
"Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her."
"If an ordinary person is silent, it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent, he is lying."
"But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a pair of scales and death on the other. He wished each of his acts, indeed each day, each hour, each second of his life to be measured against the supreme criterion, which is death. That was why he wanted to march at the head of the column, to walk on a tightrope over an abyss, to have a halo of bullets around his head and thus to grow in everyone's eyes and become unlimited as death is unlimited. . ."
"I think talent is dangerous to have if you take it for granted. If you use it well and put hard work with it together, it's hard to catch that guy. And I think that's what you're seeing right now."
"One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction."
"Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress."
"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."
"Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves."
"I put my money in the bank: I have to think of life after modeling, when I'm not famous any more."
"In the first moments, the members of the Presidium who were with me at the Secretariat were taken to the Party Central Committee under the control of Soviet forces."
"Seems like most of the kids today are into other sports other than tennis."
"Dying before dying has two important consequences: It liberates the individual from the fear of death and influences the actual experience of dying at the time of biological demise."
"The psyche of the individual is commensurate with the totality of creative energy. This requires a most radical revision of Western psychology."
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