Great Throughts Treasury

"Children are no past and this is the whole mystery magical innocence of their smile."

"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."

"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."

"Co-incidence means that two unexpected events occur simultaneously."

"Compassion is the curse of the exchange of emotions from one person to another."

"Condemnation of those who do not know what to do, barbaric act."

"Confusion between the physical appearance of the beloved and the appearance of another: how many times he had previously lived it? Lived always surprised themselves: Is the difference between them and the others, then this stray? How can you not know how to recognize a good love objects to him, a good object prepared unmatched?"

"Children, you are the future,' he said, and today I realize he did not mean it the way it sounded. The reason children are the future is not that they will one day be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future."

"Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of earth and his earthy being, and become half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant."

"Coincidence of coincidence of just have a word to say to us. Arising from necessity, we expect it to be, day after day repeating everything is dumb. Tell us something just a coincidence."

"Creativity objects unbearable lightness."

"Criminal regimes is not established by people who are criminals, but people who are excited and convinced that they have found the only way that leads to heaven. They took the defending valiantly for this route, and for this they have to execute many. Then, later, it became clear more than Nu day, that henna is not existed and that they were enthusiastic if just thugs."

"Culture succumbs low volume production, the avalanche of letters, the madness of quantity. That is why I say that a book banned in your country means infinitely more than the millions of words that spew our universities."

"Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about its future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoil, take its incurable stupidity seriously."

"Desire for a sense of compassion and desire about them torturing her two one desire."

"Dissatisfaction with her own looks was slowly changing into defiance; the thought that the trumpeter was going to see her in a cheap and unattractive dress, whether he liked it or not, gave her a certain spiteful satisfaction."

"Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."

"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."

"Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories ? and come up with nothing but clich‚s: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."

"Don't be scared, don't be scared, you won't feel any pain there, you'll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you'll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don't be scared."

"Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can?t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."

"Do and myself me a magnet able to take pointless expeditions to the old times of freedom and unwinding, selecting and searching when you're not tied to anything, and could not decide between the myriad of possibilities? Will I be able myself to part with those impulses that for me merge with youth? And will I still have something besides finally imitate them and tried to raise safe wall between these deviations and their foolish reasonable life? And what if it's just a pointless game? What do I know? Will you stop playing the game just because it is purposeless? I knew that it would not happen. I knew that soon I will set out from Prague that will stop these girls and concocting new and new shenanigans. I will tear will doubt and hesitation, while Martin as a mythological figure, will remain intact and solid and will continue metaphysical battle with time and a damn narrow limits between which writhes and twists our lives."

"Doing love with a woman, and sleeping with a woman, Hauran are completely different, but not just different, but antagonism. Love does not make itself a sense of wanting to have intercourse (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women), but the feeling of wanting to co-sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."

"Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper."

"Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten."

"Each new possibility that existence has even less likely, transforms the entire existence."

"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."

"Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other."

"Even a life of suffering has a mysterious value. Even a life on the threshold of death is a thing of splendor. Anyone who has not looked death in the face does not know this, but I know it."

"Drunkenness we could also call it weakness. One becomes aware of his weakness and not to fight it, but delivered. His drunk his weakness, wants to be even weaker, wants to fall in the middle of the square, in the eyes of all, and still want to be down below that down."

"During the twenty years of his absence, Ita?ani have preserved many memories of Odysseus, but are not grieved for him. At the same time, Odysseus was suffering from nostalgia, but not remembers almost nothing. This strange contradiction can be understood if we accept that the memory in order to be well-served to us, we must continuously be trained, and if, in conversations between friends, memories are not constantly present them disappears. The emigrants gathered in their communities to retell nausea always the same story, and thus remembered. However, those who do not see their own countrymen, as Irene or Odysseus, will inevitably be affected by the loss of memory. What nostalgia stronger, the more it frees up memory. What is Odysseus longed more, more is forgotten. For nostalgia does not work enhances memory, do not be a memory, sufficient to itself, serves herself, totally committed to grief. Having killed the suitors who wanted to marry Penelope and dominate Ithaca, Odysseus was forced to live with people who are not on knew nothing. In order to ingratiate themselves with him, him everything they could to setae to his departure to war. Convinced that it is nothing other than his Ithaca is not interested (how could they think otherwise when he crossed the sea endlessly to return to it?), Fatigue repeated events that took place in his absence, eager to answer all of his questions. Did not hurt him any more boring than that. He was expecting one thing, that he finally said: tell! and it was the only word that he never said. Twenty years ago only dreamed of coming back, and when he returned, he understood, surprised, that the essence of his life, its center, its treasures, outside Ithaca, in those twenty years wanderings. This treasure was lost and could not find him just chatting. After leaving Calypso, sailing back, he suffered shipwreck in Phoenicia which it is king in his palace. There was a stranger, a mysterious stranger. Every stranger ask, Who are you? Where did you come from? Tell! And he's talking about. During a long eight singing Odysseus, describing in detail his adventures before flabbergasted Phoenicians. However, to Ithaca, he was a foreigner, he was one of them, and because none of them came to the idea that he says: Talk."

"Early in the novel [Anna Karenina], Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition ? the same motif appears at the beginning and the end ? may seem quite ?novelistic? to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as ?fictive,? ?fabricated,? and ?untrue to life? into the word ?novelistic.? Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven?s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual?s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. ? But it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood."

"Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."

"Eroticism is commercially ambiguous, because although all aspire erotic life, all also hate it as the cause of their misfortune, frustration, envy, complex, suffering."

"Even if she did find them ugly, she would never say so, because flattery had long since become second nature to her."

"Even though man himself is mortal, he can imagine neither the end of space nor of time nor of history nor of a people, for he always lives in an illusory infinitude. Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like 'forward' and 'farther' are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it."

"Even painful memories are ties that bind."

"Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players."

"Every human life has many aspects. The past of each one of us can be just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statesman as into that of a criminal."

"Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments."

"Even today the story is nothing more than the narrow strand of what is remembered on the ocean of forgotten, but time marches on and the time will come that the years have many figures, and the individual's memory, to be remained the same in extent, not be able to cover them, so they will be disappearing from her centuries and millennia whole centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discovery, battles, books, and that will be serious, because man lose consciousness of self and its history, inconceptuable, irrepressible, will shrink in a few abbreviations devoid of meaning"

"Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations."

"Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write."

"Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup."

"Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O 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."

"Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death."

"Excessive ends, behind the life that ended limits means and in art in politics, extremism passion for death, heard an implicit longing, actually."

"Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant."

"Fair hair and dark hair, are the two poles of human character. Dark hair means manliness, courage, openness and entrepreneurship, while light hair a symbol of femininity, gentleness, helplessness and passivity. Blonde is, therefore, a double female. The princess must be blonde. Because women, in order to be more feminine, hair colors in yellow, and never in the black."