The Glass Room

She knows what it is to be sad and miserable, but those emotions are almost enjoyable. They throw moments of happiness and laughter into sharper relief.

Regulations. The city, the country, probably the whole world (having travelled little, Tomáš is unsure about the matter) is pinned down by regulations. His own view is that regulations are designed to control the future and if we all live in an eternal present then regulations are, by definition, powerless.

It wasn’t the way that Viktor and Katalin looked at each other, it was the way they didn’t look. It wasn’t the notes, it was the silences between the notes.

in Czech we have an expression, propadnout lásce, to fall in love. You can’t do that in German, can you? In German you just come into love. But in Czech you can fall into it.

A work of art like this,’ he tells one of the journalists, ‘demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well. I am certain that Viktor Landauer and his beautiful wife will do the place justice.

The Slavs aren't unintelligent of course, just emotionally unstable, liable to great heights and great depths. That is what science tells one. Look at Tchaikovsky. Look at Dostoyevsky.