# Quote — Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

> Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.

- Author: [Václav Havel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/vaclav-havel.md)
- Book: [Disturbing the Peace](https://www.leafyquotes.com/vaclav-havel/disturbing-the-peace.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel#Disturbing_the_Peace_(1986)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/vaclav-havel/disturbing-the-peace/twenty-or-thirty

## More from this book

> The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning — in other words, of absurdity — the more energetically meaning is sought.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/vaclav-havel/disturbing-the-peace/the-deeper-the.md)

> We introduced a new model of behavior: don't get involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight "only" for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end. In other words, don't get mixed up in backroom wheeling and dealing, but play an open game.

p. 83 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/vaclav-havel/disturbing-the-peace/we-introduced-a-new.md)

> Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have — by disrupting that order — a way of surprising.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/vaclav-havel/disturbing-the-peace/drama-assumes-an-order.md)