Great Throughts Treasury

"All the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. Drink it to the dregs. No cheating allowed. No making believe it's not there. Modern man cheats. He tries to get around all the milestones on the road from birth to death."

"Alpha password is the first big statement appeared in Czechoslovakia spring 1968 and was demanding the deployment of a radical democracy in the communist regime, was signed this statement crowd of intellectuals, and then signed by the ordinary people, and started pouring signatures so can no longer be counted, and when the army invaded the Russian Chiokuluvakaa began operations Political cleansing there was a question addressed to the citizen says, Do you also signed a statement on the millennial word? there abode of those who have fallen from their jobs in the case."

"Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts."

"All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was lying beside him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love for her. Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly. What are you looking at? she asked. He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind. I?m looking at the stars, he said. Don?t say you?re looking at the stars. That?s a lie. You?re looking down. That?s because we?re on an airplane. The stars are below us. Oh, in an airplane, said Tereza, squeezing his hand even tighter and falling asleep again. And Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out of the round window of an airplane flying high above the stars."

"Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy."

"Among the men who pursue many women we can easily distinguish between two categories: Some seek their own subjective and always the same dream about women. The latter are driven by a desire to seize the endless variety of the objective world of women."

"And Jakub realized that this child had done no harm, that he was not guilty of anything, and yet had been born with bad eyes and would have them forever. And he reflected further that what he had held against others was something given, something they came into the world with and carried with them like a heavy wire fence. He reflected that he had no privileged right to high-mindedness and that the highest degree of high-mindedness is to love people even though they are murderers."

"And I felt happy inside these songs... where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and soul... where they dance in joy."

"And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to re-experience a love the way we reread a book or re-see a film."

"And suddenly something unforgettable occurred: suddenly she felt a desire to go to him and hear his voice, his words. If he spoke to her in a soft, deep voice her soul would take courage and rise to the surface of her body, and she would burst our crying. She would put her arms around him the way she had put her arms around the chestnut tree's thick trunk in her dream."

"And something else raised him: he held an open book on the table. In that bar no one had ever opened a book on the table. A book for Tereza was a sign of recognition of a secret brotherhood. Against the vulgarity of the world around her, in fact it had only one defense: the books you borrowed to the public library."

"Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."

"Another issue raised him to the other higher: he had fallen on the desk of an open book. It is not anyone else in the restaurant had never dropped a book on the table. The book was Terezalle secret guild emblem. He was able to fight around him spreading the roughness of the world in just one weapon: books, especially novels, which he quoted in the library. He had read a lot, Fielding to Thomas Mann. Books were his life that did not satisfy him. But they had a meaning to the objects: he was fun to go on a book under his arm. He used the records of the previous century, a stylish dandy stick. Book set him apart."

"Another image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman?s very eyes, put his arms around the horse?s neck and burst into tears. That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse of Descartes. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse."

"Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not."

"Anyhow, he asks himself, what is an intimate secret? Is that where we hide what's most mysterious, most singular, most original about a human being? Are her intimate secrets what make Chantal the unique being he loves? No. What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has: the body and its needs, it maladies, its manias - constipation, for instance, or menstruation. We ashamedly conceal these intimate matters not because they are so personal but because, on the contrary, they are so lamentably impersonal. How can he resent Chantal, for belonging to her sex, for resembling other women, for wearing a brassiere and along with it the brassiere psychology? s if he didn't himself belong to some eternal masculine idiocy! They both of them got their start in that putterer's workshop where their eyes were botched with the disjointed action of the eyelid and where a reeking little factory was installed in their bellies. They both of them have bodies where their poor souls have almost no room. Shouldn't they forgive that in each other? Shouldn't they move beyond the little weaknesses they're hiding at the bottom of drawers? He was gripped by an enormous compassion, and to draw a final lune under that whole story, he decided to write her one last letter."

"Any student in physics lessons can put the experience to ensure the correctness of a scientific hypothesis. But the man who lives one single life, deprived of the opportunity to test the hypothesis empirically, and it is not given to know, was he or was not supposed to obey his feeling."

"Anyone goal is to top thing it is expected that someday suffering from vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, dizziness something different for fear of falling. It's the sound of the vacuum beneath us? it is a desire in the fall, and against which, the horror, to defend ourselves."

"Anyone looking for infinity, you close your eyes."

"Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself."

"Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers."

"Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock."

"As early as 1930 Schoenberg wrote: Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless; it force-feeds us music . . . regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it, with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises. Radio was the tiny stream it all began with. Then came other technical means for reproducing, proliferating, amplifying sound, and the stream became an enormous river. If in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, regardless whether we want to hear it, it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, re-orchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don't know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can't tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying."

"As he moved on it, forward then backward, it seemed ever describe the same movement from childhood to adulthood and back again, and again the little boy who looked miserably a huge body of woman to man hugging the body and tames. This movement, which usually measured fifteen inches away, was long as three decades."

"Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?"

"Art arises from sources other than logic."

"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. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones?I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized 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. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own I ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."

"As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness. This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited! As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch."

"As they walked to his quarters, she had never assumed that would come to such close proximity and in a moment was afraid: if the touch he had boiled off guard (that constant readiness characteristic of mature woman had long since left for her in the past; we can find something in common between their countries and a young girl kissed for the first time - the girl is not ready yet, and she is not ready and that more and now are in a secret relationship as similar eccentricities of old age and childhood). He moved to the couch, pressed her to him and began to stroke her whole body, she felt in his arms shapeless soft (yes, that is soft because of her long was gone overwhelming sensuality and giving immediately necessary time with the rhythm of the muscles tensing and relaxing game and dozens of fine movements)."

"As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom."

"At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life."

"At the very beginning of Genesis it is written that God created man to entrust dominion over the birds, fish and animals. Clear that Genesis was written by a man and not a horse. There is no doubt that God has entrusted to man effectively the security domain for other beings. Rather, it seems that man invented God to become holy dominion over the cow and the horse, which had usurped."

"At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?"

"At the end of true love and death is only a love that ends in death is love."

"Beauty by mistake' -- the final phase in the history of beauty."

"Bacon's portraits are an interrogation on the limits of the self. Up to what degree of distortion does an individual still remain himself? To what degree of distortion does a beloved person still remain a beloved person? For how long does a cherished face growing remote through illness, through madness, through hatred, through death still remain recognizable? Where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?"

"Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it. We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what enabled western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance piazza. 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 in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry...Sabina was very much attracted by the alien quality of New York's beauty. Fran found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for Europe."

"Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. You mean you were really jealous? she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death."

"Beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery."

"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."

"Because it is so and it applies to all never know why people get irritated, what makes us sympathetic, ridiculous? our image is our greatest mystery for us."

"Because everyone will eventually come to an unrelated at the thought of being seen or heard in the universe is suffering. Thus, while there is still time, he wants to transform into a universe consisting of the word."

"Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music."

"Because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love. (In that case my friend Hubl would have point out to me, no one loves us more than the police. That's true. Just as every height has its symmetrical depth, so love's interest has its negative the police's curiosity. We sometimes confuse depth with height, and I can easily imagine lonely people hoping to be taken to the police station from time to time for an interrogation that will enable to talk about themselves.)"

"Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell."

"Beds are laid down on the two sisters, for a certain thing were not laughing, laugh a target of had this smile entity's about being the joy of the narrative was."

"Because love means renouncing strength."

"Because misogynists are the best of men. All the poets reacted to these words with hooting. Boccaccio was forced to raise his voice: Please understand me. Misogynists don?t despise women. Misogynists don?t like femininity. Men have always been divided into two categories. Worshipers of women, otherwise known as poets, and misogynists, or, more accurately, gynophobes. Worshipers or poets revere traditional feminine values such as feelings, the home, motherhood, fertility, sacred flashes of hysteria, and the divine voice of nature within us, while in misogynists or gynophobes these values inspire a touch of terror. Worshipers revere women?s femininity, while misogynists always prefer women to femininity. Don?t forget: a woman can be happy only with a misogynist. No woman has ever been happy with any of you!"

"Because man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more the thought of a move away from each other. And finally, because man is never what we think to be."

"Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while by mistake. Beauty by mistake- the final phase in the history of beauty."