The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting Quotes
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
"Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love."
"Beauty is a spark that flashes when, suddenly, across the distance of years, two ages meet."
"Laughter, an immense and delicious sensual pleasure, wholly sensual pleasure."
"We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history."
"Mankind. They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life."
"No one knew better than Marketa how sad it is to be better. She was better, but only for lack of anything better."
"Women don’t look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women."
"They made Mirek sign the list of seized items and then asked him and his son to come along with them. The trial took place after a year of preventive detention."
"We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."
"We stretched out side by side on a bed and began. By pretending, of course. Forced laughter. Laughable laughter. Laughter so laughable it made us laugh."
"Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying."
"All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter."
"Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things, make us laugh."
"The whole secret of Tamina’s popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself."
"Every day, she engaged in a kind of spiritual exercise before this picture, trying to visualize her husband in profile, then half profile, then three-quarter."
"Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
"The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside."
"For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words."
"The only thing they had in common), so as to be able to go on making love to her."
"Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love."
"Variation form is the form in which concentration is brought to its maximum."
"Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord!"
"Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!"
"If you don’t care about the destination, you don’t ask where you’re going!"
"The desire to offer them her ear had gone away."
"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything—love, convictions, faith, history—no longer has meaning."
"Death has a double aspect: It is nonbeing. But it is also being, the terrifyingly material being of a corpse."
"When she wanted her husband cremated and his ashes scattered, it was to avoid being tormented the rest of her life by the thought of what had become of that beloved body."
"Death’s sweetness is blue in color. Because nonbeing is an infinite emptiness and empty space is blue and there is nothing more beautiful and more soothing than blue."
"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."
"The ability to gaze turns the hammer into a living being, but a good carpenter must bear its insolent gaze and, with a firm hand, turn it back into a thing."
"Everywhere east of the Elbe, children belong to what are called Pioneer organizations. They wear red kerchiefs around their necks, go to meetings like adults."
"The history of music is perishable, but the idiocy of guitars is eternal. Music nowadays has returned to its primeval state."
"History is a series of ephemeral changes, while eternal values are immutable, perpetuated outside history, and have no need of memory."
"Children are the future not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future."