Prague City Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I knew a little bit about Prague. The first thing that came to mind was that Prague citizens had a habit of throwing powerful officials out of windows—the Second Defenestration of Prague began the Thirty Years War in 1618. There wasn’t another capital city with a First Defenestration that I knew of, let alone a second one. Prague was full of my kind of people.

This melancholy company is curiously consoling. It is restful to be exempted from the obligation to find, in every spire and pinnacle of the mother of cities, reason to wonder and delight.

The minister said, "Music in stone," and truly this phrase, bandied about by authors of art books, described Prague well. The city was, indeed, steeped in music and brought into harmony by it.

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

Prague is a threshold.” “A threshold?” “Yes. Between the life of good and … the other.” Sarah thought of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “I’m not going to have to fight demons, am I?

I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from. In recent years this condition has, if anything, become worse: I go to and from Vienna at diminishing intervals, and from Nathal I will often go to some other big city, to Venice or Rome and back, or to Prague and back. The truth is that I am happy only when I am sitting in the car, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. I am happy only when I am traveling; when I arrive, no matter where, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only between places.

I’ll find my group one day. Friends I belong with, a city, a community, a place to get all those ideas out and let them be heard and appreciated. I’ll be something one day. I know I will.
 For now I’m walking lonely in Prague at Christmas, feeling like the happiest, most unknown girl in the world.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.” —Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946

It is said that you are a New Yorker the moment you remember the way New York used to be. This miraculous place lives to obliterate its history. It is history as fashion. Trend. Moments. Moments lost and... overwritten. You have to hunt the past in NY. Not like Prague. Budapest. Krakow. Paris. Istanbul. These places wear their pasts with honor over their hearts. A woman. Not a girl. New York... is youth. Always trying on new masks, new faces.

Emperor Maximillian had brought peace to the kingdoms of Moravia, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. Though he had no time for his many children, he had found time to cultivate tulips in his beloved hrad gardens in the city of Prague.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

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.

When you are quite well enough to travel, Latimer, I shall take you home with me. The journey will amuse you and do you good, for I shall go through the Tyrol and Austria, and you will see many new places. Our neighbours, the Filmores, are come; Alfred will join us at Basle, and we shall all go together to Vienna, and back by Prague...' My father was called away before he had finished his sentence, and he left my mind resting on the word Prague with a strange sense that a new and wondrous scene was breaking upon me: a city under the broad sunshine, that seemed to me as if it were summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course-unrefreshed for ages by dews of night, or the rushing rain-cloud; scorching the dusty, weary, time-eaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like deposed and superannuated kings in their regal gold inwoven tatters. The city looked so thirsty that the broad river seemed to me a sheet of metal; and the blackened statues, as I passed under their blank gaze, along the unending bridge, with their ancient garments and their saintly crowns, seemed to me the real inhabitants and owners of this place, while the busy, trivial men and women, hurrying to and fro, were a swarm of ephemeral visitants infesting it for a day. It is such grim, stony beings as these, I thought, who are the fathers of ancient faded children, in those tanned time-fretted dwellings that crowd the steep before me; who pay their court in the worn and crumbling pomp of the palace which stretches its monotonous length on the height; who worship wearily in the stifling air of the churches, urged by no fear or hope, but compelled by their doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit, as they live on in perpetual midday, without the repose of night or the new birth of morning. A stunning clang of metal suddenly thrilled through me, and I became conscious of the objects in my room again: one of the fire-irons had fallen as Pierre opened the door to bring me my draught. My heart was palpitating violently, and I begged Pierre to leave my draught beside me; I would take it presently. ("The Lifted Veil")

The dormitory had been carved out of those grand rooms once polluted by aristocrats and rich people. Beatrice had disappeared from my world. I was in Prague. Caught among buildings that were dark: a square of buildings. The poet of those buildings, Pierre, and I, lovers for many years, were fucking on a tattered red carpet in a hotel. I had to find my hotel. Pierre pointed to an old, as if marbled, red column that rose above the city, so far that I couldn't see its top. He explained to me that this is his family's home: the column runs through the sky horizontally over the whole city. I ascertained that Pierre's parents are wealthy. I had never known this before. Pierre left me. The dark square of buildings, named 'The Dormitory,' in which I was standing lies in the upper right quadrant of the city. A long, narrow, black plank or street connected this square to its twin that occupied the city's upper left quarter. I had to reach the second square so that I wouldn't be murdered. As I started walking the black plank, the sky above the black was yellow. Now I was in the second square, standing in a hotel, which was Pierre's hotel. So it must belong to Pierre. Since I hadn't wanted to be in his hotel, I had to be lost. I was lost in a foreign city, as I've been time and time again.

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;

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.

Years of nightly patrols had made each street familiar beneath his boots, a home as beautiful as it was deadly. On one street, he had shyly kissed Bina Laska when he was sixteen. On the next, he had held an elderly woman in his arms as life drained from her body, blood pooling onto the cobblestones like rainwater. Prague did not know Domek, did not need him, but his life was overlaid on the ancient streets in watercolor, the patterns sheer and impermanent.

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.

What a lucky girl you are to have this opportunity to live in one of the world's great cities at this most fascinating point in its long, rich history, they had said. Little Becky had known enough not to ask if there was going to be a Banana Republic or a Gap there, or a Tower Records or a Starbucks or a Tweeters or a Blockbuster or a Super CVS or a Saks. Her mother only mentioned museums and concert halls and churches and architecture, so Little Becky was quite sure there was no room left in Prague for anything good to be built.

Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt, money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of political arithmetic.” A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-de-camp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse low,” Hamilton noted. He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”; “Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.” He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances, and the total economic output of assorted nations.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow . . . The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.

She pictures herself in early 1939, aged nine, standing in front of the astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Hall square. She’s sneaking a peek at the old skeleton. It keeps watch over the rooftops of the city with huge empty eye sockets. They’d told them at school that the clock was a piece of mechanical ingenuity, invented by Maestro Hanuš more than five hundred years ago. But Dita’s grandmothers told her a darker story. The king ordered Hanuš to construct a clock with figures, automatons that paraded on the stroke of every hour. When it was completed, the king ordered his bailiffs to blind the clockmaker so that he could never make another wonder like it. But the clockmaker took revenge, putting his hand into the mechanism to disable it. The cogs shredded his hand, the mechanism jammed, and the clock was broken, unfixable for years. Sometimes Dita had nightmares about that amputated hand snaking its way around the serrated wheels of the mechanism. Dita,

I wondered what exactly the war had accomplished. Men had fought great battles: the Battle of the Bulge, the battle for Monte Casino, the battle for the beaches, for God and country, for God and freedom, for God and a pure race. They had left hundreds of cities in ruins and their people without shelter or food.

He might say he had made a mistake in moving to this foreign city—it had seemed like a good idea in California, but now where else could he go?

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.

The week of the Reagan funeral, makeshift shrines of flowers and such sprung up at Eureka College and in Dixon, Illinois, at the presidential library in Simi Valley, at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, at the Reagan home in Bel Air, and in towns and villages across the nation. Memorials appeared, too, in Prague and Budapest and in cities and villages across the former “Captive Nations” of the Baltics, as well as in the former Warsaw Pact countries. Few, if any, were visible on the campus of Harvard or in the tony Georgetown section of Washington, nor in the Upper West Side of Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

...an unlikely group pieced together these past few weeks from parties and family references, friend-of-friend happenstance, and (in one case, just now being introduced) sheer, scarcely tolerable intrusiveness-five people who, in normal life back home, would have been satisfied never to have known one another. Five young expatriates hunch around an undersized cafe table: a moment of total insignificance, and not without a powerful whiff of cliche. Unless you were one of them. Then this meaningless, overdrawn moment may (then or later) seem to be somehow the summation of both an era and your own youth, your undeniably defining afternoon (though you can hardly say that aloud without making a joke of it). Somehow this one game of Sincerity becomes the distilled recollection of a much longer series of events. It persistantly rises to the surface of your memory-that afternoon when you fell in love with a person or a place or a mood, when you savored the power of fooling everyone, when you discovered some great truth about the world, when (like a baby duck glimpsing your quacking mother's waddling rear for the first time) an indelible brand was seared into your heart, which is, of course, a finate space with limited room for searing. Despite its insignificance, there was this moment, this hour or two, this spring afternoon blurring into evening on a cafe patio in a Central European capital in the opening weeks of its post-Communist era. The glasses of liqueur. The diamond dapples of light between oval, leaf-shaped shadows, like optical illusions. The trellised curve of the cast-iron fence seperating the patio from its surrounding city square. The uncomfortable chair. Someday this too will represent someone's receding, cruelly unattainable golden age. (4-5)

The question to round off this exploration of townscape is this: does the magic of places gradually drain away through familiarity? How do we counter those who claim that the worm that corrupts our delight in cities is habituation ? Fine for visitors, but what about inhabitants who see their town or city day after day? // The answer lies in the nature of emotional reward. If habituation really was the killer, then we would not bother to hear repeats of Brahms or Britten; we would have no wish to return to Florence or Prague. The fact is, the more places engage with the emotions the more resilient they are to erosion by habituation.

Do what you love, and excel in it.

and eastern Europe, to settle in town, especially in the capital cities of the Habsburg and Wilhelmine empires. It was in the context of this multiform upheaval – the demographic growth and the urbanization process generated by the industrial revolution, modernization and assimilation – that German Jewry acquired a new profile. Vienna, where no more than 2,000 Jews had lived in 1850, counted more than 200,000 on the eve of the First World War, or 10 per cent of the total population; in the same timeframe, the Jewish population of Berlin grew from less than 10,000 to nearly 200,000, here making up 7 per cent of the total population.12 The Jewish populations of Budapest, Prague, Lvov, Krakow and Czernowitz underwent similar growth.

ANTON LOVED PRAGUE. In fact, he simply couldn’t understand how it was possible not to. There were some cities that confused you and suffocated you from the first, and there were some whose charm slowly and imperceptibly fascinated you.

There are certain cities and certain areas of certain cities where the official language is dreams. Venice is one. And Paris. North Beach in San Francisco. Wenceslaus Square in Prague. And New Orleans, the city that dreams stories. Writers come and eavesdrop and take some of those stories with them, but these are just a few drops from a Mississippi river of stories.

It’s romantic: two expats in a car full of paintings making their way across an ancient city. One heartbroken, strike that, both in varying states of brokenheartedness. Aren’t we all?

In media interviews, we made up preposterous lies and were amazed to see them printed uncritically in The Times and City Limits. Sometimes

La Révolution urbaine first appeared in 1970, in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising in Paris. Cities around the world from Detroit to Tokyo, Prague to Mexico City, were the scene of major revolts, connected less through any organizational affiliation than through political empathy linking highly diverse struggles, and as the 1960s culminated in worldwide challenges to capitalism, war, racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the alienation of modern urban life, the book was inevitably received as a political testament to the possibilities for fundamental political and social change.

The time of Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a human­ity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names dif­ferent from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name. ... The street Tamina was born on was called Schwerinova Street. That was during the war, when Prague was occupied by the Germans. Her father was born on Cernokostelecka Avenue. That was under Austria-Hungary. When her mother married her father and moved in there, it was Marshal Foch Avenue. That was after the 1914-1918 war. Tamina spent her child­hood on Stalin Avenue, and it was on Vinohrady Avenue that her husband picked her up to take her to her new home. And yet it was always the same street, they just kept changing its name, brainwashing it into a half-wit.

In 1968, the Tet offensive in Vietnam took the lives of thousands of GIs and made it clear to a lot of Americans that we were fighting an unwinnable war.  Meanwhile the people of Prague, Czechoslovakia rose up against their Soviet oppressors and the United States did nothing to help them, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, there were riots in the streets of major cities, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured the police beatings of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.  Oh! and yes, as if that wasn't enough, Richard Nixon was elected President.  Otherwise things were fine.

A long time ago I was in the ancient city of Prague and at the same time Joseph Alsop, the justly famous critic of places and events, was there. He talked to informed people, officials, ambassadors; he read reports, even the fine print and figures, while I in my slipshod manner roved about with actors, gypsies, vagabonds. Joe and I flew home to America on the same plane, and on the way he told me about Prague, and his Prague had no relation to the city I had seen and heard. It just wasn’t the same place, and yet each of us was honest, neither one a liar, both pretty good observers by any standard, and we brought home two cities, two truths.

The train filled up in Hungary and in Czechoslovakia it was overcrowded. I sat next to a Czech, to whom I spoke about all kinds of matters. He was a train conductor and was going home, to Prague, for a few days leave. He offered to show me his city, but I did not know where I would stay and for how long. We made an appointment, like the "good soldier Schweik" at noon, two days later, at the statue on Wenczeslaw Square. He said that everybody would be able to tell me where it was. By the time we all got off the train, all ten of us, nobody awaited us. Since it was Sunday morning, there was no answer when we phoned.

We spent the few days in Prague enjoying this historic city, with its unusual sights from the Middle Ages: the oldest synagogue in Europe called the Alt- Neu Synagogue (Old-New Synagogue), with the cemetery in back of the house of worship. The legend of the Golem of Prague originated from there. Rabbi Loew, known in Jewish scholarship as Rabbi Judah, the Maharal, wrote a famous commentary to Rashi. Among the legends told about him is the creation of the Golem, who on instruction from the Rabbi saved the Jewish community from persecution. As soon as the Golem had fulfilled his mission, the rabbi returned him to his lifeless state.

The Left has governed the great cities of the world before. Paris, Marseilles, Madrid, London under Red Ken, have all succumbed to the siren song of the Left at odd moments in the not too distant past. Barcelona was in fact once governed by committees of anarchists. Rome, Milan, and Naples have fallen under the Red Thumb. Stalinist proxies ruled Prague and Warsaw and Budapest and the traffic flow kept moving. The Communists took the garbage out in Moscow.

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.

Kafka loved the streets, palaces, gardens and churches of the city where he was born. He looked with joyful interest through the pages of all the books on the antiquities of Prague which I brought to him in his office. His eyes and hands literally caressed the pages of such publications, though he had read them all long before I placed them on his desk. His eyes shone with the look of a passionate collector. The past was for him not some historically dead collector's piece, but a supple instrument of knowledge, a bridge to today.

He is always watching her go. He sees her meandering along a river path with explosions of light behind her, walking down a pavement in Prague, striding across a dead city, courage in every step. And now, with the moonlight glinting in her hair, she’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look at her. Part of him yearns to run after her. It would be an easy choice—to follow her down whatever path she chooses. He’s spent a lifetime following other people’s footsteps. And who is he without his scholar’s tattoo, his quest, his mistress? Who is he without Violet Everly? Nothing, a voice whispers. But for the first time, the word sits companionably in his head, a curiosity. He says it out loud, and although there’s no one to hear him say it, the question lingers in the air all the same. For now, he decides he can live with it, as he learns to live without everything else. To be nothing is to be remade, after all.