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If Hatred Strikes You, If You Get Accused, Thrown To The Lions, You Can Expect One Of Two Reactions From People Who Know You: Some Of Them Will Join In The Kill, The Others Will Discreetly Pretend To Know Nothing, Hear Nothing, So You Can Go Right On Seeing Them And Talking To Them. That Second Category, Discreet And Tactful, Those Are Your Friends. 'friends' In The Modern Sense Of The Term. Listen, Jean-marc, I've Known That Forever.

-Milan Kundera

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If Hatred Strikes You,

Milan Kundera

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If Hatred Strikes You, If You Get Accused, Thrown To The Lions, You Can Expect One Of Two Reactions From People Who Know You: Some Of Them Will Join In The Kill, The Others Will Discreetly Pretend To Know Nothing, Hear Nothing, So You Can Go Right On Seeing Them And Talking To Them. That Second Category, Discreet And Tactful, Those Are Your Friends. 'friends' In The Modern Sense Of The Term. Listen, Jean-marc, I've Known That Forever.

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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Questions And Answers

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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Nothing Requires A Greater Effort Of Thought Than Arguments To Justify The Rule Of Non-thought.

Love Is The Longing For The Half Of Ourselves We Have Lost.

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He Took Over Anger To Intimidate Subordinates, And In Time Anger Took Over Him.

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

"pick Me Up," Is The Message Of A Person Who Keeps Falling. Tomas Kept Picking Her Up, Patiently.

Love Is A Continual Interrogation. I Don’t Know Of A Better Definition Of Love.

Definition Of Love

In The Love Poetry Of Every Age, The Woman Longs To Be Weighed Down By The Man's Body.

Until That Time, Her Betrayals Had Filled Her With Excitement And Joy, Because They Opened Up New Paths To New Adventures Of Betrayal. But What If The Paths Came To An End? One Could Betray One's Parents, Husband, Country, Love, But When Parents, Husband, Country, And Love Were Gone - What Was Left To Betray?

Necessity Knows No Magic Formulae-they Are All Left To Chance. If A Love Is To Be Unforgettable, Fortuities Must Immediately Start Fluttering Down To It Like Birds To Francis Of Assisi's Shoulders.

The Reign Of Imagagology Begins Where History Ends.

Art Arises From Sources Other Than Logic." (p.32)

Disgust At Having To Talk About Oneself Is What Distinguishes Novelistic Talent From Lyric Talent.

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In The World Of Highways, A Beautiful Landscape Means: An Island Of Beauty Connected By A Long Line With Other Islands Of Beauty.

Cemeteries In Bohemia Are Like Gardens. The Graves Are Covered With Grass And Colourful Flowers. Modest Tombstones Are Lost In The Greenery. When The Sun Goes Down, The Cemetery Sparkles With Tiny Candles... No Matter How Brutal Life Becomes, Peace Always Reigns In The Cemetery. Even In Wartime, Even In Hitler's Time, Even In Stalin's Time.

Any New Possibility That Existence Acquires, Even The Least Likely, Transforms Everything About Existence.

Graphomania (a Mania For Writing Books) Inevitably Takes On Epidemic Proportions When A Society Develops To The Point Of Creating Three Basic Conditions: - (1) An Elevated Level Of General Well Being Which Allows People To Devote Themselves To Useless Activities (2) A High Degree Of Social Atomization And , As A Consequence, A General Isolation Of Individuals; (3) The Absence Of Dramatic Social Changes In The Nation's Internal Life.

Man Reckons With Immortality, And Forgets To Reckon With Death.

Flirting Is A Promise Of Sexual Intercourse Without A Guarantee.

There Is A Secret Bond Between Slowness And Memory, Between Speed And Forgetting.

There Are Things That Can Be Accomplished Only By Violence. Physical Love Is Unthinkable Without Violence.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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She Was Experiencing The Same Odd Happiness And Odd Sadness As Then. The Sadness Meant: We Are At The Last Station. The Happiness Meant: We Are Together. The Sadness Was Form, The Happiness Content. Happiness Filled The Space Of Sadness.

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The Novel Is A Territory Where One Does Not Make Assertions; It Is A Territory Of Play And Of Hypotheses.

Metaphors Are Dangerous. Love Begins With A Metaphor. Which Is To Say, Love Begins At The Point When A Woman Enters Her First Word Into Our Poetic Memory.

For He Was Aware Of The Great Secret Of Life: Women Don't Look For Handsome Men. Women Look For Men Who Have Had Beautiful Women. Having An Ugly Mistress Is Therefore A Fatal Mistake.

For The Body Is Temporal And Thought Is Eternal And The Shimmering Essence Of Flame Is An Image Of Thought.

The Novel Is Not The Author's Confession; It Is An Investigation Of Human Life In The Trap The World Has Become

Memory Does Not Make Films, It Makes Photographs.

... Characters Are Not Born Like People, Of Woman; They Are Born Of A Situation, A Sentence, A Metaphor Containing In A Nutshell A Basic Human Possibility That The Author Thinks No One Else Has Discovered Or Said Something Essential About.

Only Animals Were Not Expelled From Paradise.

He Kept Recalling Her Lying On His Bed; She Reminded Him Of No One In His Former Life.

To Die; To Decide To Die; That's Much Easier For An Adolescent Than For An Adult. What? Doesn't Death Strip An Adolescent Of A Far Larger Portion Of Future? Certainly It Does, But For A Young Person, The Future Is A Remote, Abstract, Unreal Thing He Doesn't Really Believe In.

Physical Love Is Unthinkable Without Violence.

Immortality No Longer Interests The Weary Old Man At All.

What's The Matter?" He Asked "nothing" "what Do You Want Me To Do For You?" "i Want You To Be Old. Ten Years Older. Twenty Years Older" What She Meant Was: I Want You To Be Weak. As Weak As I Am.

Merely By Being Born Intelligent, You Right Away Find Yourself In Absolute Exile.

Finding Yourself

Tereza's Mother Never Stopped Reminding Her That Being A Mother Meant Sacrificing Everything. Her Words Had The Ring Of Truth, Backed As They Were By The Experience Of A Woman Who Had Lost Everything Because Of Her Child. Tereza Would Listen And Believe That Being A Mother Was The Highest Value In Life And That Being A Mother Was A Great Sacrifice. If A Mother Was Sacrifice Personified, Then A Daughter Was Guilt, With No Possibility Of Redress.

Which Doesn't Mean, Of Course, That I'd Stopped Loving Her, That I'd Forgotten Her, Or That Her Image Had Paled; On The Contrary; In The Form Of A Quiet Nostalgia She Remained Constantly Within Me; I Longed For Her As One Longs For Something Definitively Lost.

Radio... Force-feeds Us Music... Everywhere And All The Time... Sewage-water Music In Which Music Is Dying.

It Takes So Little, So Infinitely Little, For A Person To Cross The Border Beyond Which Everything Loses Meaning: Love, Convictions, Faith, History. Human Life -- And Herein Lies Its Secret -- Takes Place In The Immediate Proximity Of That Border, Even In Direct Contact With It; It Is Not Miles Away, But A Fraction Of An Inch.

Laughing Deeply Is Living Deeply.

She Knew, Of Course That She Was Being Supremely Unfair, That Franz Was The Best Man She Ever Had- He Was Intelligent, He Understood Her Paintings, He Was Handsome And Good-but The More She Thought About It, The More She Longed To Ravish His Intelligence, Defile His Kindheartedness, And Violate His Powerless Strength

The Psychological And Physiological Mechanism Of Love Is So Complex That At A Certain Period In His Life A Young Man Must Concentrate All His Energy On Coming To Grips With It, And In This Way He Misses The Actual Content Of The Love: The Woman He Loves. (in This He Is Much Like A Young Violinist Who Cannot Concentrate On The Emotional Content Of A Piece Until The Technique Required To Play It Comes Automatically.)

Woman Is The Future Of Man. That Means That The World Which Was Once Formed In Man's Image Will Now Be Transformed To The Image Of Woman. The More Technical And Mechanical, Cold And Metallic It Becomes, The More It Will Need The Kind Of Warmth That Only The Woman Can Give It. If We Want To Save The World, We Must Adapt To The Woman, Let Ourselves Be Led By The Woman, Let Ourselves Be Penetrated By The Ewigweiblich, The Eternally Feminine!

No Great Movement Designed To Change The World Can Bear To Be Laughed At Or Belittled. Mockery Is A Rust That Corrodes All It Touches.

To Be Mortal Is The Most Basic Human Experience, And Yet Man Has Never Been Able To Accept It, Grasp It, And Behave Accordingly. Man Doesn't Know How To Be Mortal. And When He Dies, He Doesn't Even Know How To Be Dead.

We Don't Know When Our Name Came Into Being Or How Some Distant Ancestor Acquired It. We Don't Understand Our Name At All, We Don't Know Its History And Yet We Bear It With Exalted Fidelity, We Merge With It, We Like It, We Are Ridiculously Proud Of It As If We Had Thought It Up Ourselves In A Moment Of Brilliant Inspiration.

Chance And Chance Alone Has A Message For Us. Everything That Occurs Out Of Necessity, Everything Expected, Repeated Day In And Day Out, Is Mute. Only Chance Can Speak To Us.

Art Is The Human Disposition Of Sensible Or Intelligible Matter For An Esthetic End.

But Man, Because He Has Only One Life To Live, Cannot Conduct Experiments To Test Whether To Follow His Passion (compassion) Or Not.

He Was Well Aware That Of The Two Of Three Thousand Times He Had Made Love (how Many Times Had He Made Love In His Life?) Only Two Or Three Were Really Essential And Unforgettable. The Rest Were Mere Echoes, Imitations, Repetitions, Or Reminiscences.

Two People In Love, Alone, Isolated From The World, That's Very Beautiful. But What Would They Nourish Their Intimate Talk With? However Contemptible The World May Be, They Still Need It To Be Able To Talk Together.

Draw A Line; Draw A Line That Pleases You. And Remember That It Is Not The Artist's Role To Copy The Outlines Of Things But To Create A World Of His Own Lines On Paper." (pp.28-29)

Speed Is The Form Of Ecstasy The Technical Revolution Has Bestowed On Man. As Opposed To A Motorcyclist, The Runner Is Always Present In His Body, Forever Required To Think About His Blisters, His Exhaustion; When He Runs He Feels His Weight, His Age, More Conscious Than Ever Of Himself And Of His Time Of Life. This All Changes When Man Delegates The Faculty Of Speed To A Machine: From Then On, His Own Body Is Outside The Process, And He Gives Over To A Speed That Is Noncorporeal, Nonmaterial, Pure Speed, Speed Itself, Ecstasy Speed.

The Present Era Grabs Everything That Was Ever Written In Order To Transform It Into Films, Tv Programs; Or Cartoons. What Is Essential In A Novel Is Precisely What Can Only Be Expressed In A Novel, And So Every Adaptation Contains Nothing But The Non-essential. If A Person Is Still Crazy Enough To Write Novels Nowadays And Wants To Protect Them, He Has To Write Them In Such A Way That They Cannot Be Adapted, In Other Words, In Such A Way That They Cannot Be Retold.

We Are Born One Time Only, We Can Never Start A New Life Equipped With The Experience We've Gained From The Previous One. We Leave Childhood Without Knowing What Youth Is, We Marry Without Knowing What It Is To Be Married, And Even When We Enter Old Age, We Don't Know What It Is We're Heading For: The Old Are Innocent Children Innocent Of Thier Old Age. In That Sense, Man's World Is The Planet Of Inexperience.

When I Was A Little Boy In Short Pants, I Dreamed About A Miraculous Ointment That Would Make Me Invisible. Then I Became An Adult, Began To Write, And Wanted To Be Successful. Now I'm Successful And Would Like To Have The Ointment That Would Make Me Invisible.

Dogs Are Our Link To Paradise.

The Novelist Teaches The Reader To Comprehend The World As A Question.

The More Vast The Amount Of Time We've Left Behind Us, The More Irresistible Is The Voice Calling Us To Return To It.

Biographers Know Nothing About The Intimate Sex Lives Of Their Own Wives, But They Think They Know All About Stendhal's Or Faulkner's.

We Pass Through The Present With Our Eyes Blindfolded. We Are Permitted Merely To Sense And Guess At What We Are Actually Experiencing. Only Later When The Cloth Is Untied Can We Glance At The Past And Find Out What We Have Experienced And What Meaning It Has.

The Beauty Of New York Is Unintentional; It Arose Independent Of Human Design, Like A Stalagmite Cavern.

Facts Mean Little Compared To Attitudes. To Contradict Rumor Or Sentiment Is As Futile As Arguing Against A Believer's Faith In The Immaculate Conception. You Have Simply Become A Victim Of Faith, Comrade Assistant.

From Tender Youth We Are Told By Father And Teacher That Betrayal Is The Most Heinous Offence Imaginable. But What Is Betrayal?betrayal Means Breaking Ranks And Breaking Off Into The Unknown. Sabina Knew Of Nothing More Magnificent Than Going Off Into The Unknown.

There Is No Perfection Only Life

Ah, Ladies And Gentlemen, A Man Lives A Sad Life When He Cannot Take Anything Or Anyone Seriously.

...people Don't Respect The Morning. An Alarm Clock Violently Wakes Them Up, Shatters Their Sleep Like The Blow Of An Ax, And They Immediately Surrender Themselves To Deadly Haste.

To Be A Writer Does Not Mean To Preach A Truth, It Means To Discover A Truth.

The Phrase "it's Absolutely The Same With Me, I..." Seems To Be An Approving Echo, A Way Of Continuing The Other's Thought, But That Is An Illusion: In Reality It Is A Brute Revolt Against A Brutal Violence, An Effort To Free Our Own Ear From Bondage And To Occupy The Enemy's Ear By Force. Because All Of Man's Life Among His Kind Is Nothing Other Than A Battle To Seize The Ear Of Others.

Because Beyond Their Practical Function, All Gestures Have A Meaning That Exceeds The Intention Of Those Who Make Them; When People In Bathing Suits Fling Themselves Into The Water, It Is Joy Itself That Shows In The Gesture, Notwithstanding Any Sadness The Divers May Actually Feel. When Someone Jumps Into The Water Fully Clothed, It Is Another Thing Entirely: The Only Person Who Jumps Into The Water Fully Clothed Is A Person Trying To Drown; And A Person Trying To Drown Does Not Dive Headfirst; He Lets Himself Fall: Thus Speaks The Immemorial Language Of Gestures.

Mankind's True Moral Test, Its Fundamental Test (which Lies Deeply Buried From View), Consists Of Its Attitude Towards Those Who Are At Its Mercy: Animals. And In This Respect Mankind Has Suffered A Fundamental Debacle, A Debacle So Fundamental That All Others Stem From It.

She Was Aware That In Love Even The Most Passionate Idealism Will Not Rid The Body's Surface Of Its Terrible, Basic Importance.

The Brain Appears To Possess A Special Area Which We Might Call Poetic Memory And Which Records Everything That Charms Or Touches Us, That Makes Our Lives Beautiful ... Love Begins At The Point When A Woman Enters Her First Word Into Our Poetic Memory.

Seeing Is Limited By Two Borders: Strong Light, Which Blinds, And Total Darkness.

But What Had Happened, Had Happened, And It Was No Longer Possible To Right Anything.

In The Realm Of Totalitarian Kitsch, All Answers Are Given In Advance And Preclude Any Questions.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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Pliny The Elder

Chuck Palahniuk

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