poets-from-the-czech-republic

"Pták a cikán doma všude."

"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."

"Writers use the same tools (i.e. words) as scientists. They perform on the same stage, but move in the opposite direction. The sciences and poetries do not share words, they polarise them."

"Sciences .. are based on a single logical meaning of the sentence or of the word. ... On the contrary, poetry tries for as many possible meanings and interactions between words and thoughts as it can."

"The experience of the little discovery is the same when looking into the microscope and when looking at the nascent organism of the poem. It is one of the few real joys of my life."

"The people demand of you that you be equal to these great historical times, that you sacrifice all other considerations, that you offer your utmost abilities, that you act at this time as men who are independent, who have no personal ties and obligations, men of supreme moral and national consciousness."

"The program of our nation is given by its history and by its racial individuality, by its modern political life and by its rights and by all that which gave rise to these rights and solemnly guaranteed them."

"These desires and these rights of the Czecho-Slovak nation get new strength and new emphasis through the progress to date of the world war, for the future of Europe is coming to have a new, democratic appearance. All our political aims likewise must be looked at from a standpoint equally elevated and freedom loving, combined with the old Bohemian honesty, unselfishness and devotion, with the ancient noble consideration for the honor of the Bohemian nation and for the verdict of the future. These great qualities the Bohemian nation manifested through the self-confident calm which it managed to preserve during the war in spite of all provocation, not needing instruction by its delegates or other political counsels. This self-confident calm, this instinct of self-preservation, were the healthiest expression of our national life. This eloquent national silence, unbroken through the severest oppression, was to continue till the end of the world struggle."

"A lad changed to a shrub in spring, the shrub into a shepherd boy, A fine hair to a lyre string, snow into snow on hair piled high."

"No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches."

"It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten. In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life."

"People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten."

"The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!" The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late. Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

"The first step in liquidating a people," said Hubl, "is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Physical love is unthinkable without violence."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"Love is our freedom."

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme."