Prague Short Quotes

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.

She pictures his jovial figure, dressed up in his T-short, shouting that Kafka was born in Prague, and she feels a desire rising through her body, the irrepressible desire to take a lover. Not to patch up her life as it is. But to turn it completely upside down. Finally take possession of her own fate.

During my stop in Prague, E.U. officials had expressed alarm about the rise of far-right parties across Europe and how the economic crisis was causing an uptick in nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and skepticism about integration. The sitting Czech president, Václav Klaus, to whom I made a short courtesy visit, embodied some of these trends. A vocal “Eurosceptic” who’d been in office since 2003, he was both ardently pro–free market and an admirer of Vladimir Putin’s. And although we tried to keep things light during our conversation, what I knew of his public record—he had supported efforts to censor Czech television, was dismissive of gay and lesbian rights, and was a notorious climate change denier—didn’t leave me particularly hopeful about political trends in central Europe.

So from morning onward I’m kept company by pictures of weather fronts, lovely abstract lines on maps, blue ones and red ones, relentlessly approaching from the west, from over the Czech Republic and Germany. They carry the air that Prague was breathing a short while ago, maybe Berlin too. It flew in from the Atlantic and crept across the whole of Europe, so one could say we have sea air up here, in the mountains. I particularly love it when they show maps of pressure, which explain a sudden resistance to getting out of bed or an ache in the knees, or something else again—an inexplicable sorrow that has just the same character as an atmospheric front, a moody figura serpentinata within the Earth’s atmosphere.

The man uttering these words had a face like the Golem of Prague and a barrel-shaped body that belonged on a beer cart. He wore a short leather coat and a cap with a peak that grew straight out of his forehead. He had ears like an Indian elephant, a mustache like a toilet brush, and more chins than the Shanghai telephone directory

There are many men who have reminded me of Stu. It's a masculine asset to be the host, the mayor. The confident bonhomie is a kind of shorthand: it's short for having a big dick. Later, when I was teaching near Prague, I met a woman who liked to discuss Rasputin; she harbored a barely concealed lust for Rasputin and only dated men who had big wild eyes. She said, about Rasputin. "He had a great big dick." No, I thought, but in all likelihood he was an excellent host.

I do not know if my mother broke off her studies at Charles University only because her parents’ money had run out. How far was she pushed to emigrate to Palestine by the violent hatred of Jews that filled the streets of Europe in the mid-1930s and spread to the universities, or to what extent did she come here as the result of her education in a Tar-buth school and her membership in a Zionist youth movement? What did she hope to find here, what did she find, what did she not find? What did Tel Aviv and Jerusalem look like to someone who had grown up in a mansion in Rovno and arrived straight from the Gothic beauty of Prague? What did spoken Hebrew sound like to the sensitive ears of a young lady coming with the refined, booklearned Hebrew of the Tar-buth school and possessing a finely tuned linguistic sensibility? How did my young mother respond to the sand dunes, the motor pumps in the citrus groves, the rocky hillsides, the archaeology field trips, the biblical ruins and remains of the Second Temple period, the headlines in the newspapers and the cooperative dairy produce, the wadis, the hamsins, the domes of the walled convents, the ice-cold water from the jarra, the cultural evenings with accordion and harmonica music, the cooperative bus drivers in their khaki shorts, the sounds of English (the language of the rulers of the country), the dark orchards, the minarets, strings of camels carrying building sand, Hebrew watchmen, suntanned pioneers from the kibbutz, construction workers in shabby caps? How much was she repelled, or attracted, by tempestuous nights of arguments, ideological conflicts, and courtships, Saturday afternoon outings, the fire of party politics, the secret intrigues of the various underground groups and their sympathizers, the enlisting of volunteers for agricultural tasks, the dark blue nights punctuated by howls of jackals and echoes of distant gunfire?

An interesting case,” said Bourru. “He complained of paralysis, anesthesia, contractions, muscular spasms, hyperesthesia, skin irritation, hemorrhaging, coughing, vomiting, epileptic fits, catatonia, sleepwalking, Saint Vitus’ dance, speech impediments . . .” “Sometimes he thought he was a dog,” said Burot, “or a steam locomotive. And then he had persecutory delusions, restricted vision, gustatory, olfactory and visual hallucinations, pseudo-tubercular pulmonary congestion, headache, stomachache, constipation, anorexia, bulimia, lethargy, kleptomania . . .” “In short,” Bourru said, “a normal picture.