Quotes by Czech Authors - Page 9

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka
Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.
Martina Boone
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Milan Kundera
We know that the world operates on a whim, a system of coincidences. There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after lost, building a structured life ... in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst ... This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comfort of battle - the human heart is content when distracted by war. The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us ... This is the way to survive in this world, to walk up in the morning ... and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerk that pump blood through our emaciated veins.
Jaroslav Kalfar
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.
Milan Kundera
Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
Franz Kafka
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.
Franz Kafka
You can’t have relationships if you’re not willing to open yourself up and lean on people as much as you want them to lean on you.
Martina Boone
The engineer’s ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poet’s mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively--and which had seemed so intoxicatingly beautiful--had no turned out to be the great, mutually fulfilling love she was convinced she had a full right to expect. Her father was the owner of two prosperous Prague pharmacies, and her morality was based on strict give-and-take. For her part, she had invested everything in love (she had even been willing to sacrifice her parents and their peaceful existence); in turn, she had expected her partner to invest an equal amount of capital of feelings in the common account. To redress the imbalance, she gradually withdrew her emotional deposit and after the wedding presented a proud, severe face to her husband.
Milan Kundera
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.
Milan Kundera
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.
Milan Kundera
We've lost a lot of years, but you can't lose love. Not real love. It stays locked inside you, ready for whenever you are strong enough to find it again.
Martina Boone
The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.''Do I look like a liar?''You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.
Milan Kundera
Men are jealous of every woman, even when they don’t have the slightest interest in her themselves.
Jan Neruda
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.
Milan Kundera
Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agélastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!
Milan Kundera
The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything.
Milan Kundera
Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.
Franz Kafka
It doesn't matter how great your shoes are if you don't accomplish anything in them.
Martina Boone
..the writer’s obsession – the desire to know and communicate, or, rather, to know everything so as to communicate with the greatest degree of precision.
Ivan Klíma
Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.
Arnošt Lustig
Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.
Franz Kafka
I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.
Jan Neruda
No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.
Jan Neruda
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
Milan Kundera
What is written is merely the dregs of experience.
Franz Kafka
In a way, I was safe writing
Franz Kafka
Writer speaks a stench.
Franz Kafka
Writing is prayer.
Franz Kafka
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Franz Kafka
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Franz Kafka
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.
Franz Kafka
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
Franz Kafka
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]
Franz Kafka
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.
Franz Kafka
Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good...
Milan Kundera
Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.
Franz Kafka
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Milan Kundera
When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.
Franz Kafka
The face of the dead man was concealed, of course, our customs not being those of the south, where corpses are carried to the grave in open coffins, that they might – one last time before slipping into the pit – be warmed by the light of the sun.
Jan Neruda
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?
Franz Kafka
Death always knew how to connect vice with misfortune.
Jindřich Štyrský
Each day death corrodes what we call living, and life ceaselessly swallows our desire for the void.
Jindřich Štyrský
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate.
Franz Kafka
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and towns and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical, but relative.And when Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find new ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and the number of their regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average legth of a corpse as 172 centimeters. And a total of 15, 508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide. And in 1918 an influenza known as Spanish Flu spread throughout the world killing over twenty million people. Pacifists and anti-militarists subsequently said that these had also been victims of the war because the soldiers and civilian populations lived in poor conditions of hygiene, but epidemiologists said that the disease killed more people in countries where there was no war, such as Oceania, India or the United States, and the Anarchists said that it was a good thing because the world was corrupt and heading for destruction.
Patrik Ouředník
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?
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
Kill me, or you are a murderer.
Franz Kafka
One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.
Franz Kafka
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
Hope is possibly the only inexhaustible resource on earth.
Martina Boone
Love doesn't come with an on-off switch. It's made of too many threads of memory and hope and heartache that weave themselves into the very core of who you are.
Martina Boone
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Václav Havel
Lidské tělonaprogramuješ na všechno.
Kristina Čechová
But there was a difference between being stuck and choosing to stay. Between being found and finding yourself.
Martina Boone
Víš jak chutná sníh?" "Ne.""Tak zkus chytit vločku na jazyk." Předváděl jsem ti jak. V tu chvíli jsi stála u mě. "Dáš mi ochutnat?
Kristina Čechová
If someone gave you the rules to the game you have been playing right away, you would miss the most exciting part – the details. Sometimes it’s all about the details, they make the whole more meaningful.
Iva Kenaz