The Joke Quotes
"Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"
"No man is completely lost, however great his mistakes."
"All I had left was time. Time I came to know intimately as never before."
"I was living in a pause. Not in an orchestra’s general pause, but in a pause without a determined end."
"I was the only one who deliberately earned his black insignia and took pleasure in wearing it."
"I could not stand to hear anyone supposedly close to me acknowledge that guilt and that verdict."
"I refused to capitulate. I really wanted to bear my non-resemblance; to be the person it was decided I was not."
"The sorrow that kept me from joining the drunken wedding party had sensitized me to the chloroform seeping into the clear waters of these folk rituals."
"I suddenly saw myself playing in the last two May Day parades with Prague-born Zemanek at my side singing and dancing and waving his arms."
"I finally understood that my rebellion was illusory, that my non-resemblance was perceptible only to me, that it was invisible to others."
"If you were as tall as you are stupid, the sun’d burn a hole through your head."
"In those few hours (and in those few places not off limits) he could act like a rich man and make up for the chronic frustration of all the other endless days."
"Nothing brings people together more quickly (though often spuriously and deceitfully) than shared melancholy."
"Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand."
"Everything we did in camp after a day in the mines was a sort of board-hauling."
"Youth is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality."
"Responsibility was unthinkable without freedom."
"In Lucie I possessed a prize vouchsafed neither to my fellow soldiers nor to our officers: I was loved, I was loved publicly and demonstratively."
"The feeling of comradely solidarity that had led me to paint so detailed a picture of Lucie’s nakedness and erotic behavior had the effect of painfully intensifying my desire for her."
"The only bridge, the only link. The only fragile stem of an unbroken tradition."
"I do not say that my attitude towards her had become coarse or superficial or that it had lost its tenderness."
"I believe things have a meaning, Vladimir. I believe the fates of men are bonded one to the other by the cement of wisdom."
"Everything I said with the slightest bearing on our lives served to remind us that we’d taken separate paths."
"I felt the inexorable order in it, an order I accepted and merged with."
"The man of the people is more honest. Singing on his way, he goes to the core of every basic situation."
"But time hasn’t yet wakened my friend from his enchantment."
"It’s not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it’s your friends."
"There is nothing rare about the merging of the bodies of two strangers. Even the union of souls may occasionally take place."
"I waited in vain. This era finally betrayed its religious nature, and it has paid dearly for its rationalist heritage."
"As long as people can escape to the realm of fairy tales, they are full of nobility, compassion, and poetry."
"True religion does not need the favor of secular power. Secular disfavor only strengthens faith."
"Everything that happens happens according to God’s will."
"To go on living the life of a free man, to work more, love more, sing more, and wander the world over."
"In the realm of everyday life they are, alas, more prone to caution, mistrust, and suspicion."
"The revolutionary era from 1948 to 1956 had little in common with skepticism and rationalism. It was an era of great collective faith."
"Her behavior in the dormitory was exemplary. Before her flight there had been only one offense, one entirely unusual: she had been caught stealing flowers in a cemetery."
"She declared several times that she was happy on the farm and didn’t want to leave."
"Yet there was always something in her taciturnity that betrayed a life of pain and a wounded soul."
"She knew nothing about [herbs] and could hardly name one."
"She shrugged her shoulders and said, 'I don’t know.'"
"Beautiful flowers were found only in the cemetery. Lofty flowers, majestic flowers."
"The coffin had been buried there only a few days before."
"Give yourself along with the burden you bear. There is a great comfort in giving yourself."
"Everything on this earth which belongs to God may also belong to the Devil."
"I’m not so sure about that," said Zemanek with a smile.
"I heard the breeze and velvet bells in the white treetops."
"Everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed."
"Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory and in redressibility."
"No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten."
"Helena knew what she was doing but was too tough on her crew, since she was always ready to work overtime and disregarded the fact that others might be in a hurry to get home."
"Body and soul... no reason to live. Farewell."
"What's going on?" asked the youth in a subdued voice.
"Helena, Helena!" There was no reply; only the apple tree, stirring in the gentle breeze, rustling its branches against the wooden wall of the shack.
"For God's sake, go away!" she cried in anguish.
"Beast, beast, beast, beast!" she gasped as she pummeled me on the back with her free hand.
"I'm not letting you go until you tell me what you took."
"What's the matter?" I asked, and she turned without a word and made her way back to the outhouse.
"There's got to be somewhere else! A toilet! Or a cellar!"
"I only like it here. Here by the river. Here there is water flowing, slowly, and for millennia."
"Now I knew! Now I understood why he forbade me to take off the veil and wanted me to know only what he related to me!"
"The fault lay elsewhere and was so great that its shadow had fallen far and wide, on the whole world of innocent things (and words), and was devastating them."
"Jaroslav became the soul of us all, and I was amazed at what an excellent musician this big fellow was."
"I realized with a shock that my trip home...had ended with me holding my stricken friend in my arms."
"I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods."