Prague Quotes

Unable to see, they were briefly seized by the characteristic Prague anxiety of never finding the entrance
of arriving at one's goal but remaining blocked from it by a wall or a stone on account of having overlooked an alley or medieval door a few dozen yards back, which has served as the approach so immemorially that no one any longer marked or described it. ~ Caleb Crain

The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe. ~ John Lewis

LATER. - I must go to Germany. At midnight Murrow phoned from London with the news. The British and French have decided they will not fight for Czechoslovakia and are asking Prague to surrender unconditionally to Hitler and turn over Sudetenland to Germany. I protested to Ed that the Czechs wouldn't accept it, that they'd fight alone ... . Maybe so. I hope you're right. But in the meantime Mr. Chamberlain is meeting Hitler at Godesberg on Wednesday and we want you to cover that. If there's a war, then you can go back to Prague. ~ William L. Shirer

Rabbi Loew of sixteenth-century Prague. He is supposed to have formed an artificial human being - a robot - out of clay, just as God had formed Adam out of clay. A clay object, however much it might resemble a human being, is "an unformed substance" (the Hebrew word for it is "golem"), since it lacks the attributes of life. Rabbi Loew, however, gave his golem the attributes of life by making use of the sacred name of God, and set the robot to work protecting the lives of Jews against their persecutors. ~ Isaac Asimov

Love.
That was the piece that had been missing, way before Prague. That was that piece that had been missing in her life until Will came and made her feel it, for their work together and for the beauty and also for him, though it was hard sometimes to separate those things. Maybe she didn`t love Will like she thought. Or couldn't in this moment.
But what they'd done together, what had been open by becoming so close, she could still love that. She could love their conversations and their hours at the piano and the results of their work. She could even love the way it hurt right now, because when was the last time she gave her whole heart to something?
That, all of it, belonged to her. She didn't have to let Will take it away, the way she'd let her grandfather, the business, herself, take her love for music. ~ Sara Zarr

We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same. Hatred has to be cultivated as a civic passion. The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. ~ Umberto Eco

The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice
a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick. ~ Hal Rothman

What about concerts and opera performances? Nowadays these bring him little pleasure [...] These people have no interest in classical music - they would much prefer operettas or films with Marika Rokk[...]
How can he possibly enjoy music under such circumstances? What good is it to invite the finest musicians and conductors of the Reich to Prague, when they must perform for such uneducated audience, who applaud only dutifully and never with enthusiasm. And, of course, the artists sense this immediately; they have a well-developed instinct about their audiences. Therefore, they play and sing any old way, without distinction. ~ Jiří Weil

[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots. ~ Stephan Delbos

When I went to Czechoslovakia under the old Communist regime one day in the '80s, I thought to myself whatever I do, whatever happens to me in Prague I'm not going to use the name Kafka, I'm just not going to do it. I won't do it; it's so easy, everyone else does, I'm not going to. I'll write the first non-Kafka mentioning piece. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In Moscow, dim and green under the summer rain, columns of armour were waiting in the side-roads off the long avenue from Vnukovo airport. Tanks from the Taman Division stood beneath the dripping trees around Moscow University with their field kitchens and command trucks. This was not a new sight to me: the Soviet tanks had rested like that beneath the trees of the parks in Prague, late in another August twenty-three years before. Now they had invaded and crushed one more country
their own. ~ Neal Ascherson

My work has no theme. I don't care if my photographs get published, and I have no interest in the news. But the invasion of Prague was not news, it was my life. ~ Josef Koudelka

She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty. ~ Milan Kundera

Kundera was also a postmodernist writer, but he completely lacked this embracing of other worlds, with him the world was always the same, it was Prague and Czechoslovakia and the Soviets who had either invaded or were on the point of doing so, and that was fine, but he kept withdrawing his characters from the plot, intervening and going on about something or other while the characters stood still, waiting as it were, by the window or wherever it was they happened to be until he had finished his explanation and they could move forward. Then you saw that the plot was only 'a plot' and that the characters were only 'characters', something he had invented, you knew they didn't exist, and so why should you read about them? Kundera's polar opposite was Hamsun, no one went as far into his characters' world as he did, and that was what I preferred, at least in a comparison of these two, the physicality and the realism of Hunger, for example. There the world had weight, there even the thoughts were captured, while with Kundera the thoughts elevated themselves above the world and did as they liked with it. Another difference I had noticed was that European novels often had only one plot, everything followed one track as it were, while South American novels had a multiplicity of tracks and sidetracks, indeed, compared with European novels, they almost exploded with plots. One of my favourites was A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez, but I also loved Love in the Time of Cholera ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

In all these sights I achieve solace only in bringing forth trees, picturing them blooming like smoke from the roofs of gutted buildings, dreaming of what a fine and picturesque pile of rubble this city will someday make. ~ Tod Wodicka

Who is the pioneer of modern journalism? Not Hemingway who wrote of his experiences in the trenches, not Orwell who spent a year of his life with the Parisian poor, not Egon Erwin Kisch the expert on Prague prostitutes, but Oriana Fallaci who in the years 1969 to 1972 published a series of interviews with the most famous politicians of the time. Those interviews were more than mere conversations; they were duels. Before the powerful politicians realized that they were fighting under unequal conditions
for she was allowed to ask questions but they were not
they were already on the floor of the ring, KO'ed. ~ Milan Kundera

If Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Cracow, Warsaw, and Berlin belong to Europe, then why not Leningrad, why not Moscow--indeed, why stop before Vladivostok? It is all part of Eurasia, there is no state frontier between...I would like to think of myself as some utopian son of Europe, able to touch the Pacific at San Francisco with one outstretched arm and at Vladivostok with the other, and keeping the peace everywhere within my embrace. ~ George Konrad

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century - or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. ~ Laini Taylor

One's story isn't a skin to be shed - it's inescapable, one's body and blood. You go on pumping it out till you die, the story veined with the themes of your life, the ever-recurring story that's at once your invention and the invention of you. ~ Philip Roth

At the bottom of the pit, there is nothing to fear; above the clouds, there is nothing to hide. ~ Robert Of Prague

Prague is a dark place. ~ Fred Durst

Soon a whole guild of low-priced shrine keepers around Europe named their own pope - Boldface the Relatively Shameless, Discount Pope of Prague. The price war was on [ ... ] The Retail Pope would offer cheesy bacon toppings on the Host with communion and the Discount Pope would counter with topless nun night for midnight mass. ~ Christopher Moore

As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close. ~ Laini Taylor

And policemen. They were obliged to sneak past two en route to Kampa. Thomas was a contentedly law-abiding child, with fond feelings toward policemen. He was also afraid of them. His notion of prisons and jails had been keenly influenced by reading Dumas, and he had not the slightest doubt that little boys would, without compunction, be interred in them. He began to be sorry to have come along. He wished he had never come up with the idea of having Josef prove his mettle to the members of the Hofzinser Club. It was not that he doubted his brother's ability. This never would have occurred to him. He was just afraid: of the night, the shadows, and the darkness, of policemen, his father's temper, spiders, robbers, drunks, ladies in overcoats, and especially, this morning, of the river, darker than anything else in Prague. ~ Michael Chabon

My worst memory is of my first dance lesson as a 14-year old in Prague. My mother put me in this silver and pink lame dress. My hair was all curled, and it was the first time I wore a garter belt. I felt so out of place! ~ Martina Navratilova

I'm fed up with you," I said furiously. "I told you quite specifically the first time you tried to undo my skirt that I am not into emotional fuckwittage. It was very bad to carry on flirting, sleep with me then not even follow it up with a phone call, and try to pretend the whole thing never happened. Did you just ask me to Prague to make sure you could still sleep with me if you wanted to as if we were on some sort of ladder?" "A ~ Helen Fielding

Prague might be the perfect place, after all: a city that valued anonymity, the desire to be no one and someone at once. ~ Matthew Salesses

I personally think Prague is more romantic than Paris. If you have a girlfriend, take her there. ~ Stephanie Sigman

The Crusade Produced the first Holocaust:

"The Jews of Mainz try to persuade the crusaders by casting coins and precious goods from their windows . The offering is not sufficient. The crusaders drag families from their dwellings and order them to submit to the christian baptism. The peasants with their scythes and sickles slice the throats of all those who refuse. over 900 suffer martyrdom. Out breaks of the program take place in other cities : Cologne , Trier, Prague and Ratisbon. The anti-jewish sentiment spreads throughout France and England. How many are slaughtered to provide provisions for the Peasant Crusade remains historians' guess. Some say 10,000. ~ Paul L. Williams

I ate fantastic Italian food in Croatia, which you wouldn't expect. The food in Istanbul was amazing. I never would've expected that and the food, I guess you're learning something about me, the food in Prague, they're very, very heavy meat eaters, like, a lot of meat, which is great. ~ Cliff Curtis

Well, it's the Czech Republic now, but more specifically Prague. I went there when I was 12. ~ Anwar Robinson

The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about 'socialism with a human face.' ~ Adam Michnik

When, as my friend suggested, I stand before Zeus (whether I die naturally, or under sentence of History)I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense.Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zius will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him : "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me." And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

The close of my studies with a degree of a Dr. Ing. in 1929 coincided with the great economic crisis, and I was not able to find an academic position. I was therefore very grateful for a position in the newly created laboratory of G.J. Driza in Prague where rare chemicals were produced on small scale. ~ Vladimir Prelog

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The sky's inclemency stirs up the angry winds;
the watery clouds are soaking with ceaseless rain.
The turbulent Vltava, swollen with rainy waves,
Bursting, impetuous, breaks through its river banks. ~ Elizabeth Jane Weston

Prague is the Paris of the '90s. ~ Marion Ross

Besides, Prague is famous for its many churches with gold-leaf covered domes. In the sunshine, Prague is golden. I fell in love for ever. At the end of the five day stay, the entire group boarded a train for Paris. Although my parents knew the time of my arrival, they could not travel on the ~ Pearl Fichman

North Korean students and intellectuals didn't dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. ~ Barbara Demick

No country was ever easier to spy on, Tom, no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, confide them, or consign them too early to the junk heap of planned American obsolescence. I am too young to know whether there was a time when Americans were able to restrain their admirable passion to communicate, but I doubt it. Certainly the path has been downhill since 1945, for it was quickly apparent that information which ten years ago would have cost Axl's service thousands of dollars in precious hard currency could by the mid-70s be had for a few coppers from the Washington Post. We could have resented this sometimes, if we had smaller natures, for there are few things more vexing in the spy world than landing a scoop for Prague and London one week, only to read the same material in Aviation Weekly the next. But we did not complain. In the great fruit garden of American technology, there were pickings enough for everyone and none of us need ever want for anything again. ~ John Le Carre

WHO'S GOT A TAMPON? I JUST GOT MY PERIOD, I will announce loudly to nobody in particular in a women's bathroom in a San Francisco restaurant, or to a co-ed dressing room of a music festival in Prague, or to the unsuspecting gatherers in a kitchen at a party in Sydney, Munich, or Cincinnati. Invariably, across the world, I have seen and heard the rustling of female hands through backpacks and purses, until the triumphant moment when a stranger fishes one out with a kind smile. No money is ever exchanged. The unspoken universal understanding is: Today, it is my turn to take the tampon. Tomorrow, it shall be yours. There is a constant, karmic tampon circle. It also exists, I've found, with Kleenex, cigarettes, and ballpoint pens. ~ Amanda Palmer

I believe when you're speaking English, you're allowed to refer to it as Prague. ~ Emily St. John Mandel

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about. ~ Peter Sis

We had a poster of the Davis Cup in 1986. It was in Prague, the Czech Republic against Sweden, and we went to watch, so I got the poster. You couldn't get all the posters. You were lucky if you got one. ~ Martina Hingis

Dolorita Hunsickle says that the chipmunks tell your fortune if you catch them but I never did. She says a chipmunk told her she would grow up to be a famous ballerina and that she would die of consumption unloved in a boardinghouse in Prague. ~ Neil Gaiman

All cities are jealous of Paris, but Prague is the envy of Paris. ~ Alexandra Bracken

I could've said a thousand things in that moment, and all of them would've been true. I'd like to travel - Florence and Thailand and Prague. I'd like to write books. I'd like to fall in love a thousand times. Live hard and desperate and full, my pulse pounding like a bass drum. And when I wake up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up, I'd like to be sure in the knowledge that I enjoyed it. Every fucking second. ~ Megan Stielstra

The Polish freedom movement of 1968 lost its confrontation with police violence; the Prague Spring was crushed by the armies of five Warsaw Pact members. But in both countries, 1968 gave birth to a new political consciousness. ~ Adam Michnik

Prague does not have its name for no reason - in truth,
Prague is a threshold between the life on Earth
and Heaven, a threshold much thinner and narrower then in any other places… ~ Gustav Meyrink

I'd get out of here," he said. "Go someplace where no one knew me. Start over. Go to Paris like you did or go to - I don't know - Prague. Somewhere." He looked toward the window, like he could already see himself gone.
"Oh," she said, because it hurt that he was thinking about that when she was thinking about him. She narrowed her eyes. "What's stopping you?"
The boy looked down at the book of fairy tales. "Nothing," he said.
Lila wanted to be the one to stop him. ~ Holly Black

Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines. ~ Philip Sington

Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where. ~ Richard Davenport-Hines

My God, how long would you have let me wander around Prague before you said 'hold up a minute, Helga, this isn't Japan! ~ Abigail Roux

It was through this odor that he saw the museums and discovered the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague with its gold magnificence. The altars, which glowed softly in the darkness, seemed borrowed from the coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent over the city. The glistening scrolls and spirals, the elaborate setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the creches made for children at Christmas, the grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish, and overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons. The god worshipped here was the god man fears and honors, not the god who laughs with man before the warm frolic sea and sun. ~ Albert Camus

I was 25 years old and pursuing my doctorate in economics when I was allowed to spend six months of post-graduate studies in Naples, Italy. I read the Western economic textbooks and also the more general work of people like Hayek. By the time I returned to Czechoslovakia, I had an understanding of the principles of the market. In 1968, I was glad at the political liberalism of the Dubcek Prague Spring, but was very critical of the Third Way they pursued in economics. ~ Vaclav Klaus

Such a beautiful place at night. This is Prague. ~ Rick Pryll

I'd heard it said before that Prague was a fairy-tale city. Watson repeated it now as we made our slow progression in from the airport. Steepled roofs, pastel buildings, cobbled roads an switchbacks. An astronomical clock that stood stories high in a public square. I'd been there once before with Milo when we were children. Our Aunt Araminta had decided we needed "culturing". I think she may have mistaken us for bacteria. ~ Brittany Cavallaro

In some of the great cities of Europe - Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels - tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe. ~ Rose George

Prague is not, strictly speaking, travel writing but it is, among other things, an excellent example of what travel writing is becoming, if indeed it hasn't already done so ... People are no longer so easily satisfied by the mere travel impressions of some outsider much like themselves. Instead they gravitate towards writers who actually have lived not simply in, but inside, a location for an extended period, as one lives inside one's clothes. ~ George Fetherling

What happened? Stan repeats.
To us?
To the country?
What happened when childhood ends in Dealey Plaza, in Memphis, in the kitchen of the Ambassador, your belief your hope your trust lying in a pool of blood again? Fifty-five thousand of your brothers dead in Vietnam, a million Vietnamese, photos of naked napalmed children running down a dirt road, Kent State, Soviet tanks roll into Prague so you turn on drop out you know you can't reinvent the country but maybe you reimagine yourself you believe you really believe that you can that you can create a world of your own and then you lower that expectation to just a piece of ground to make a stand on but then you learn that piece of ground costs money that you don't have.
What happened?
Altamont, Charlie Manson, Sharon Tate, Son of Sam, Mark Chapman we saw a dream turn into a nightmare we saw love and peace turn into endless war and violence our idealism into realism our realism into cynicism our cynicism into apathy our apathy into selfishness our selfishness into greed and then greed was good and we
Had babies, Ben, we had you and we had hopes but we also had fears we created nests that became bunkers we made our houses baby-safe and we bought car seats and organic apple juice and hired multilingual nannies and paid tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear.
What happened?
You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a b ~ Don Winslow

The engineer's ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poet's mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively
and which had seemed so intoxicatingly beautiful
had no turned out to be the great, mutually fulfilling love she was convinced she had a full right to expect. Her father was the owner of two prosperous Prague pharmacies, and her morality was based on strict give-and-take. For her part, she had invested everything in love (she had even been willing to sacrifice her parents and their peaceful existence); in turn, she had expected her partner to invest an equal amount of capital of feelings in the common account. To redress the imbalance, she gradually withdrew her emotional deposit and after the wedding presented a proud, severe face to her husband. ~ Milan Kundera

She rounded on me with such ferocity that for a moment I didn't recognize her. A flash of fangs, a dark gleam in her blacker-than-night eyes. It was the most vampiric I'd ever seen her. ~ Melika Dannese Lux

...Would you like to know the view I have out of my window, since you love snow? So here you are: the broad whiteness of the Moldau, and along that whiteness, little black silhouettes of people cross from one shore to the other, like musical notes. For example, the figure of some boy is dragging behind him a D-sharp: a sledge. Across the river there are snowy roofs in a distant, lightweight sky...


I walked around the cathedral along a slippery path between snowdrifts. The snow was light, dry: grab a handful, throw it up, and it disperses in the air like dust, as if flying back up. The sky darkened. In it appeared a thin golden moon: half of a broken halo. I walked along the edge of the fortress wall. Old Prague lay below in the thickening mist. The snowy roofs clustered together, cumbrous and dim. The houses seemed to have been piled anyhow, in a moment of terrible and fantastic carelessness. In this frozen storm of outlines, in this snowy semi-darkness, the streetlamps and windows were burning with a warm and sweet lustre, like well-licked punch lollipops. In just one place you could also see a little scarlet light, a drop of pomegranate juice. And in the fog of crooked walls and smoky corners I divined an ancient ghetto, mystical ruins, the alley of Alchemists... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Their is beauty everywhere on earth. ~ Josef Skvorecky

If any town in Europe would have vampires, he knew it would be Prague. ~ Barbara Hambly

Prague is far more than the sum of its physical parts or its history. It is a city of the mind and the imagination, a city that exists as vividly in poetry and painting and music and legend as it does in brick and stone... Just as the physical city of Prague would be unimaginable without its unique topography, without its palaces, its churches, its parks, its streets, and its hostelries, so the Prague of the mind would be unimaginable without its storytellers and the tales they weave. ~ Paul Wilson

Today's Gypsies, who have lived in Prague for only two generations, light a ritual fire wherever they work, a nomads' fire crackling only for the joy of it, a blaze of rough-hewn wood like a child's laugh, a symbol of the eternity that preceded human thought, a free fire, a gift from heaven, a living sign of the elements unnoticed by the world-weary pedestrian, a fire in the ditches of Prague warming the wanderer's eye and soul. ~ Bohumil Hrabal

I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire. ~ Ellis Peters

In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head, and says: I know just what you mean. ~ Milan Kundera

Cold snowman a caress, and when they return, they have to throw snow symbolically difficulties that would like to get rid of.

They suggest other times the scene being at sea, muscle building "problems disastrous appearance" or roasting sausages on campfire in which it is then possible difficulties burn individuals scene vividly experience, few it just a pose.

I can take the help of hypnosis to get back to childhood?

Yes, and sometimes the experimental and therapeutic uses of reasons. But in "past lives", as someone asks you to get through hypnosis.

These are issues that go beyond science.

Among the methods with which experimented with in psychotherapy, were also experiments with LSD. You've experienced this era ...

Yes. With that began in the late 50th years of the last century at the Prague Psychiatric Clinic Associate Professor Muscovite.

With LSD, which is referred to as a hallucinogen, can cause short-term state similar to psychosis were examined and muscles exercises treatment options were available American preparation After this, the abuse and exploitation of the legal ban.

You yourself tried LSD?

I experienced experimental LSD intoxication as a student assistant professor Robbie. I had a nice experience, as I had the feeling that the bathyscaphe plunged into the depths of the sea, where I can watch the special animals. Or I saw a swirling carousel, everything was brigh ~ Health Fitness

Here in Prague they say that although the traffic police are communists the drivers are fascists, which would be all right if it were not that the pedestrians are anarchists. ~ Len Deighton

I am Bartimaeus! I am Sakhr al-Jinni, N'gorso the Mighty, and the Serpent of Silver Plumes! I have rebuilt the walls of Uruk, Karnak, and Prague. I have spoken with Solomon. I have run with the buffalo fathers of the plains. I have watched over Old Zimbabwe till the stones fell and the jackals fed on its people. I am Bartimaeus! ~ Jonathan Stroud

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh,
Each one of us avoided the hellfire. ~ Moshe Szulsztein

Once I accidentally left my passport in Nice, France, when I was on my way to Prague. Upon arriving in Vienna, after taking an overnight, and being asked to present my travel documents and realizing I forgot them at the hotel, they kicked me off the train and sent me back! ~ Megalyn Echikunwoke

My photographs are proof of what happened. When I go to Russia, sometimes I meet ex-soldiers ... They say, 'We came to liberate you ... ' I say: 'Listen, I think it was quite different. I saw people being killed.' They say: 'No. We never ... no shooting. No. No.' So I can show them my Prague 1968 photographs and say, 'Listen, these are my pictures. I was there.' And they have to believe me. ~ Josef Koudelka

the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn't know I loved sparks
I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return ~ Nâzım Hikmet Ran

Prague lay before him like a mysterious stranger in an old hat. An exotic woman waiting for him in poor light. Like an inviting gypsy with a brand-new iPod. ~ Victor Gischler

To be successful, Soviet secret policemen thought that show trials needed a complex story line, a conspiracy involving many actors, and so Soviet advisers pushed their Eastern European colleagues to link the traitors of Prague, Budapest, Berlin, and Warsaw into one story. In order to do so, they needed a central figure, someone who had known some of the protagonists and who could plausibly, or semi-plausibly, be accused of recruiting all of them. Eventually they hit on a man who fit these requirements: a mildly eccentric Harvard graduate and American State Department official named Noel Field. ~ Anne Applebaum

Icon of Prague, the medieval bridge crossed the Vltava between Old Town and the Little Quarter. Gothic bridge towers rose on both sides, and the whole span - pedestrian-only - was lined by monumental statues of saints. ~ Laini Taylor

As I sit here on a snowy morning watching the flakes gently fall outside my window, I look at the 300-year-old building across the street and the beautifully carved angels on its facade. There was a time people would create, just to give something beautiful to the world which we are so blessed to live in and a time when people understood the work of all of the arts. ~ Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Prague. Praha. The name actually meant "threshold". Pollina had said the city was a portal between the life of the good and ... the other. A city of dark magic, Alessandro had called it. ~ Magnus Flyte

For those of us imprisoned in Poland, the Prague Spring was a harbinger of hope. ~ Adam Michnik

Let me tell you how at one time the famous mathematician Euclid became a physician. It was during a vacation, which I spent in Prague as I most always did, when I was attacked by an illness never before experienced, which manifested itself in chilliness and painful weariness of the whole body. In order to ease my condition I took up Euclid's Elements and read for the first time his doctrine of ratio, which I found treated there in a manner entirely new to me. The ingenuity displayed in Euclid's presentation filled me with such vivid pleasure, that forthwith I felt as well as ever. ~ Bernard Bolzano

Regarding 'Ferris Bueller,' I was in the Czech Republic once, in Prague, making a movie at the same time as Jeffrey Jones, who played the principal, who was making a different movie. The Super Bowl was going to be playing at this bar at midnight, so we decided we would go watch the Super Bowl at this bar at midnight in Prague together. ~ Edie McClurg

If Prague and the rest of Bohemia, with all their charming hospodas delightful architecture and pretty landscape should become too cosy for you, Ostrava, the Czech Republic's third largest city with about 330,000 inhabitants, will rapidly cure your spleen. Tucked away in the country's northeastern corner on the border between Moravia, Silesia and Poland, the former Czechoslovakia's "heart of steel" offers the true flair of the Wild East. As an Australian probably would have put it, this is a city where men are men, and sheep are nervous. ~ Terje B. Englund

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which read

SWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORA
SUITS (3)-HORA
ASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORA

Josef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died. ~ Michael Chabon

You tried to kill me. Don't think we won't be telling that story to our kids someday," David said.
"Kids?" she asked, feeling breathless.
"You heard me," he said, eyes intent. "At least three of them. I figure as soon as we're married we should get started on that first one."
"Okay," she said, voice shaking.
"Glad that's settled. When we get back to Prague I'll get you a ring."
"Okay," she said again, her heart soaring.
"I'm going to sleep now, I think."
"You do that. ~ Debbie Viguie

Fairy-tale city. From the air, red rooftops hug a kink in a dark river, and by night the forested hills appear as spans of black nothing against the dazzle of the lit castle, the spiking Gothic towers, the domes great and small. The river captures all the lights and teases them out, long and wavering, and the side-slashing rain blurs it all to a dream. This was Akiva's first sight of Prague; ~ Laini Taylor

His words held depth, but not enough to make her forget the desire to do something more than just leave the hospital alive. All she could think of now was the pain of running away. She'd left her family, left Prague behind out of fear. And still war had chased her to an ARP shelter in the heart of London. How could she run again? Something mattered in standing up to fight. ~ Kristy Cambron

So I left with Jean Claude and went to Paris, so when the Russians came to Prague, I was in Paris. ~ Milos Forman

I spent four months in Prague in these blue rooms reacting to nothing and you basically place your faith in the hands of the director and the special effects co-coordinator and you keep your fingers crossed and hope that the creatures look really scary. ~ Edward Burns

In Rome the statues, in Paris the paintings, and in Prague the buildings suggest that pleasure can be an education. ~ Caleb Crain