The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Quotes

It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (I.2.1)

And then, while he was moving back and forth on her, he seemed incessantly to be describing the same movement, from childhood to adulthood and then in reverse, and once again from the little boy mi...

He imagined putting into this landscape...Mrs. Nora's naked body, and the thought then came to him that beauty is a spark that flashes when, suddenly, across the distance of years, two ages meet. T...

More time had passed than he had realized. Mama had relinquished the marshal's baton of her motherhood and gone into a different world. (II.2.7)

In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at...

He had needed at all costs to prove to himself that it was not his weakness and poverty that bound him to this woman, but love! And only a truly immense passion could justify an affair with such an...

When she reproached him, the first time they made love, about his acting too intellectual, he had tried, starting the next day, to correct that impression by showing spontaneous, unbridled passion....

Eva is a cheerful man-chaser. But she doesn't chase them to marry them. Not love but only friendship and sensuality exist for her. So she has many friends: men are not afraid she wants to marry the...

Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been...

The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on State security. One never knew when the state would start screaming tha...