The ​Book of Laughter and Forgetting 1 csillagozás

To laugh is to live profoundly.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

3. oldal

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

22. oldal

A prison, even though entirely surrounded by walls, is a splendidly illuminated theater of history.

24. oldal

… all human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flee.

11. oldal

Time in Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost all contiunity with humanity, of a humanity that no longer knows anything or remembers anything, that lives in nameless cities with nameless streets or streets with names different from the ones they had yesterday, because a name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.

157. oldal

„The first step in liquidating a people,” said Hubl, „is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
„What about language?”
„Why would anyone bother to take it from us? It will soon be a matter of folklore and die a natural death.”

159. oldal