novelists-from-the-czech-republic

"You are like a child who whistles in the dark. As though the dark cared, my poor child, as though the dark cared."

"Beyond my upset I was flooded by a deep happiness, similar to the one he made me feel when forcing me to surrender to his virility. No one else before him had given me this gratification, but I realised now that the longing to be violated, body and soul, must have always been inside me."

"It was though I had been in possession of one of those small shells with Japanese flowers which are sold at street corners. When plunged into a bowl of water, the tightly sealed shell opens and the flat, dry, coiled-up, insignificant shreds of paper contained within float out and unfold their variegated and unsuspected splendour; with Gordon I had found my bowl of water."

"My mind sometimes wanders. Do unto others and so on. Very nice again, but what if others have a different taste from yours? I don't remember who said it."

"Women are like teeth. Some tremble and never fall and some fall and never tremble."

"I love peace and quiet above everything. I hate war as does every just man, but I should like to see a great war that would clear the air like a thunderstorm, that would shatter all chains, and would thrust back to their natural bounds the hyenas among the nations. This latter most of all, for not until then will it be possible to enthrone the longed-for peace; the logic of history points to this, as does also the spirit of God in that history. The spirit of God cannot, of course, desire war and bloodshed, but the breaking of fetters and the restoration of human dignity to an earth which has breathed arrogance and hate for centuries past. I call for God’s judgment, I call for justice; millions call with a voice that will find the ear of God."

"Labels are for filing. Labels are for clothing. Labels are not for people."

"[After The Sunday Times article dated 17 February 2019.] The media, terrified of being on the wrong side of history, responded predictably, and headlines said that Navratilova was "criticised over 'cheating' trans women comments", although this criticism came largely from a relatively unknown cyclist, Rachel McKinnon, with a history of incendiary remarks (such as that lesbians such as Navratilova should "get over their genital hang-ups" when it comes to choosing sexual partners). When Navratilova published a further blog last weekend, firmly restating her position, the headlines again suggested wrongdoing on her part, such as the BBC’s "Navratilova sorry for transgender 'cheat' language as she re-enters debate". What got notably less media attention was the support for Navratilova from other elite athletes, including Chris Evert, Billie Jean King, Sally Gunnell, Paula Radcliffe, Kelly Holmes and Nicola Adams. Arguments about gender are now so vicious that most high-profile people would rather eat their hair than speak out."

"I advocate eating nutritious food (I'm a vegetarian), working out, being in top form mentally and physically."

"People who are rich want to be richer, but what's the difference? You can't take it with you. The toys get different, that's all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It's all relative."

"[On transgender athletes who have not transitioned and retain male genitals.] It’s insane and it’s cheating. I am happy to address a transgender woman in whatever form she prefers, but I would not be happy to compete against her. It would not be fair."

"I've been asked who I would pay to watch to play tennis, and Roger would be one of the few."

"Whoever said, "It's not whether you win or lose that counts", probably lost."

"Once he Kafka] went to the Berlin aquarium … Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks, "Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you any more." It was the time that he turned strict vegetarian. If you have never heard Kafka saying things of this sort with his own lips, it is difficult to imagine how simply and easily, without any affectation, without the least sentimentality—which was something almost completely foreign to him—he brought them out. Among my notes I find something else that Kafka said about vegetarianism. He compared vegetarians with the early Christians, persecuted everywhere, everywhere laughed at, and frequenting dirty haunts. "What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.""

"After years of trial and error Franz Kafka] has at last found the only diet that suits him, the vegetarian one. For years he suffered from his stomach; now he is as healthy and as fit as I have ever known him. Then along come his parents, of course, and in the name of love try to force him back into eating meat and being ill—it is just the same with his sleeping habits. At last he has found what suits him best, he can sleep, can do his duty in that senseless office, and get on with his literary work. But then his parents... This really makes me bitter."

"'And so they've killed our Ferdinand,' said the charwoman to Mr Švejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs — ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged. Apart from this occupation he suffered from rheumatism and was at this very moment rubbing his knees with Elliman's embrocation. 'Which Ferdinand, Mrs Müller?' he asked, going on with the massaging. 'I know two Ferdinands. One is a messenger at Průša's, the chemist's, and once by mistake he drank a bottle of hair oil there. And the other is Ferdinand Kokoška who collects dog manure. Neither of them is any loss.' 'Oh no, sir, it's his Imperial highness, the Archduke Ferdinand, from Konopiště, the fat churchy one.'"

"Great times call for great men. There are unknown heroes who are modest, with none of the historical glamour of a Napoleon. If you analysed their character you would find that it eclipsed even the glory of Alexander the Great. Today you can meet in the streets of Prague a shabbily dressed man who is not even himself aware of his significance in the history of the great new era. He goes modestly on his way, without bothering anyone. Nor is he bothered by journalists asking for an interview. If you asked him his name he would answer you simply and unassumingly: 'I am Švejk….'"

"Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."

"The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."

"Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost."

"Physical love is unthinkable without violence."

"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo."

"For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting."

"No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."

"Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself."

"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."

"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."

"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."

"What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."

"The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful."

""Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. "Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly."

"Love is our freedom."

"But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?"

"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."

"Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us."

"Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia."

"...[O]f a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, [...] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted."

"In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body."

"To love someone out of compassion means not really to love."

"And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?"

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."

"He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them."

"Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value."

"When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it."

"It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate."

"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."

"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."

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress."