Prague
Arthur Phillips
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It was so much easier to be alone, if one could find just the right location.”
“So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?" "I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere." "Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them.”
“No one ever knew they were old-fashioned; everyone always thought they were up-to-the-minute: Rickety Model T cars weren't rickety when they were invented, scratchy radio wasn't scratchy until television, and silent movies weren't a feeble precursor of talkies until there were talkies. Your two-piece telephone that demanded that you hold a cylinder to your ear while you screeched into the wall demanding a particular exchange of a harried, plug-juggling operator was the highest of high-tech. To know it was anything less would have been like acknowledging you were going to die and life was transient and you were already halfway to being a memory or worse. The real and worst tragedy of twentieth-century East Europeans: They had known they were old-fashioned before they could do anything about it.”
“Unrequited love is not fatal, it's just a temporary digestive disorder that leaves no visible marks, only a newly acquired but permanent inability to ever eat certain specific, unnecessary things again without having terrible digestive distress. Shrimp gives me gas, so I don't eat shrimp. I don't sit up nights crying about shrimp, right? All right then. Have two aspirin and a full glass of water, remember?”
“To feel at home. To be at peace. To know one's desires are truly one's own and not inadvertently, unavoidably, just the desires of one's forebears long dead or, worse - worst of all - the manipulations of faceless Habit, Style, Tradition, History. To go somewhere because it would be warmer, to live and just to be. With the right person for the right reason, like this very moment, so that even this place, this historyless little grocery could glow with the importance of the past, right now, tonight.”
“There was probably a range of people she had never experienced in this world and for which she had no preparation,”
“There is no "grand scheme of things." That's just a bullshit disguise for cowards. The present has no right to judge the past. Or to act in order to win the future's approval.' (Todd, the marine)”
“The most important day of your life, a wonderful moment, but know it as it happens, you feel like God himself is holding you up in his hand. (Imre)”
“Nádja was off again, in rare and wondrous form, bewitching her audience with another recollection, exquisitely told, satisfying in its construction, lyrical and glamorous, slightly improbably but nowhere near impossible. And John did not doubt its probability. Lives like Nádja's must exist; he had read enough to know this was true.”
“John understood that some things mattered and some things did not and that the happy people in this world were those who could easily and rapidly distinguish between the two. The term unhappiness referred to the feeling, of taking the wrong things seriously.”
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Book Keywords:
humor, truth
