Great Throughts Treasury

"He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward."

"He smelled the delicate aroma of her fever and breathed it in, as if trying to glut himself with the intimacy of her body. And all at once he fancied she had been with him for many years and was dying. He had a sudden clear feeling that he would not survive her death. He would lie down beside her and want to die with her."

"He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them."

"He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them from trembling."

"He still had skin covered with acne vulgaris and so it does not see himself, he covered his face mask revolt."

"He thus didn?t find himself outside the limits of his experience; he was high above it. His distaste for himself remained down below; down below he had felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here, up high in his poem, he was above his paltriness, the key-hole episode and his cowardice were merely a trampoline above which he was soaring; he was no longer subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he had written. The next day he used his grandfather?s typewriter to copy the poem on special paper; and the poem seemed even more beautiful to him than when he had recited it aloud, for the poem had ceased to be a simple succession of words and had become a thing; its autonomy was even more incontestable; ordinary words exist only to perish as soon as they are uttered, their only purpose is to serve the moment of communication; subordinate to things they are merely their designations; whereas here words themselves had become things and were in no way subordinate; they were no longer destined for immediate communication and prompt disappearance, but for durability. What Jaromil had experienced the day before was expressed in the poem, but at the same time the experience slowly died there, as a seed dies in the fruit. I am underwater and my heartbeats make circles on the surface; this line represents the adolescent trembling in front of the bathroom door, but at the same time his feature in this line, slowly became blurred, this line surpassed and transcended him. Ah, my aquatic love, another line said, and Jaromil knew that aquatic love was Magda, but he also knew that no one could recognize her behind these words; that she was lost, invisible, buried there, the poem he had written was absolutely autonomous, independent and incomprehensible as reality itself, which is no one?s ally and content simply to be; the poem?s autonomy provided Jaromil a splendid refuge, the ideal possibility of a second life; he found that so beautiful that the next day he tried to write more poems; and little by little he gave himself over to this activity."

"He took a look at the blond girl?s eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love."

"He tried to remind himself , don't think about her! don't think about her! He said to himself, I am sick with compassion."

"He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him."

"He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world?s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library."

"He tried to design his life in such a way that no woman could move in with a suitcase."

"He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple."

"He was repelled by the pettiness that reduced life to mere existence and that turned men into half-men. He wanted to lay his life on a balance, the other side of which was weighted with death. He wanted to make his every action, every day, yes, every hour and minute worthy of being measured against the ultimate, which is death."

"He was willing to pay what it is money honestly, but one does not go so far as to ask him that, as the feelings of parental non-specific, that is struggling to gain the right cap!"

"He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) Only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences."

"He watches their mouths open all at once, mouth ground, evicted words and continually burst into laughter (puzzle: how women who do not listen to each other can laugh at what they say)."

"He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall."

"Her eyes welled with tears and she felt unspeakably happy to hear the breath of Tomas to himself."

"Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day."

"He who knows himself out of the world, is not sensitive to the sufferings of the world."

"Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being."

"His biographers do not know the sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know everything about the sexual secrets of Stendhal or Faulkner."

"High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium."

"His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession?He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar."

"Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth."

"History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow."

"His connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. It is an inviolable right of a novelist to rework his novel. If the opening does not please him, he can rewrite or delete it. But Zdena's existence denied Mirek that author's prerogative. Zdena insisted on remaining on the opening pages of the novel and did not let herself be crossed out."

"His whole life he was afraid of hurting her feelings. And the only reason he submitted himself voluntarily to the discipline of a stultifying monogamy. Twenty years later, suddenly that his concern was totally unnecessary and that he has missed because of a misunderstanding dozens of women!"

"How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?"

"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more"

"How do suffer from the absence of a person present in front of us? Maybe Jean-Marc knows the answer: can sense the pain of nostalgia with a beloved Achtqah if we expect in the future, if his death was already present implicitly."

"How much wider is the time that we left behind us, more irresistible is the voice that calls us to return."

"Human life occurs only once and therefore can never find out which of our decisions were correct and which were incorrect. In the given situation we could only decide once and has not been given us a second, a third, a fourth life to compare different decisions."

"How she wished she could learn lightness!"

"Human lives are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna [Karenina] 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... 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."

"Human time does not turn in a circle, but rushes by straight line forward. That is why man cannot be happy, because happiness is the longing for repetition."

"Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border has become unrecognizable. The majority of people lead their existence within a small idyllic circle bounded by their family, their home, and their work... They live in a secure realm somewhere between good and evil. They are sincerely horrified by the sight of a killer. And yet all you have to do is remove them from this peaceful circle and they, too, turn into murderers, without quite knowing how it happened. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. A long time ago a certain Cynic philosopher proudly paraded around Athens in a moth-eaten coat, hoping that everyone would admire his contempt for convention. When Socrates met him, he said: Through the hole in your coat I see your vanity. Your dirt, too, dear sir, is self-indulgent and your self-indulgence is dirty. You are always living below the level of true existence, you bitter weed, you anthropomorphized vat of vinegar! You?re full of acid, which bubbles inside you like an alchemist?s brew. Your highest wish is to be able to see all around you the same ugliness as you carry inside yourself. That?s the only way you can feel for a few moments some kind of peace between yourself and the world. That?s because the world, which is beautiful, seems horrible to you, torments you and excludes you. If the novel is successful, it must necessarily be wiser than its author. This is why many excellent French intellectuals write mediocre novels. They are always more intelligent than their books. By a certain age, coincidences lose their magic, no longer surprise, become run-of-the-mill. Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence."

"I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that."

"Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it."

"I beg you friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope."

"I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails."

"I began to realize that there is no force that could change the picture of my personality, which is stored somewhere where the highest level decisions on human destinies, I realized that the picture (no matter how dissimilar to me) much more real than myself, that not her fault that we did not like, but it's my fault that I did not like her, that the dissimilarities my cross that I cannot shake down on anybody, that I've worn. Yet I did not want to capitulate. I wanted to wear their dissimilarities: be still what it was decided that I did not."

"I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values."

"I cannot recall those old ancient cultures without a kind of nostalgia. Of nostalgia and envy, thinking surely the gentle slowness of history at the time."

"I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare."

"I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them."

"I do not understand how one can talk about freedom without being cast this burden on his shoulders. Like a tree found in her home, which cannot grow in it, be a tree at home where you will find fertile ground."

"I don't know whether my nation will perish and I don't know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means i ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."

"I find myself fascinating."

"I have a strong will to love you for eternity."