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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.

-Milan Kundera

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Speed Is The Form

Milan Kundera

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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.

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Most People Willingly Deceive Themselves With A Doubly False Faith; They Believe In Eternal Memory (of Men, Things, Deeds, Peoples) And In Rectification (of Deeds, Errors, Sins, Injustice). Both Are Sham. The Truth Lies At The Opposite End Of The Scale: Everything Will Be Forgotten And Nothing Will Be Rectified. All Rectification (both Vengeance And Forgiveness) Will Be Taken Over By Oblivion.

There Is No Perfection Only Life

The Very Beginning Of Genesis Tells Us That God Created Man In Order To Give Him Dominion Over Fish And Fowl And All Creatures. Of Course, Genesis Was Written By A Man, Not A Horse.

What I Love In A Woman Is Not What She Is In And For Herself, But The Side Of Herself She Turns Towards Me, What She Is For Me. I Love Her As Character In Our Common Love Story. What Wuld Hamlet Be Without The Castle At Elsinore, Without Ophelia, Without All The Concrete Situations He Goes Through, What Would He Be Without The Text Of His Part? What Would Be Left But An Empty, Dumb, Illusory Essence?

The First Step In Liquidating A People 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 That Nation Will Begin To Forget What It Is And What It Was... The Struggle Of Man Against Power Is The Struggle Of Memory Against Forgetting.

Fidelity Gives A Unity To Lives That Would Otherwise Splinter Into Thousands Of Split-second Impressions.

Memory Does Not Make Films, It Makes Photographs.

Do You Realize That People Don't Know How To Read Kafka Simply Because They Want To Decipher Him? Instead Of Letting Themselves Be Carried Away By His Unequaled Imagination, They Look For Allegories - And Come Up With Nothing But Clichés: Life Is Absurd (or It Is Not Absurd), God Is Beyond Reach (or Within Reach), Etc. You Can Understand Nothing About Art, Particularly Modern Art, If You Do Not Understand That Imagination Is A Value In Itself.

Totalitarianism Is Neither Left Nor Right, And Within Its Empire Both Will Perish. I Was Never A Believer, But After Seeing Czech Catholics Persecuted During The Stalinist Terror, I Felt The Deepest Solidarity With Them. What Separated Us, The Belief In God, Was Secondary To What United Us. In Prague, They Hanged The Socialists And The Priests. Thus A Fraternity Of The Hanged Was Born.

The Pressure To Make Public Retractions Of Past Statements - There's Something Medieval About It. What Does It Mean, Anyway, To 'retract' What You've Said? How Can Anyone State Categorically That A Thought He Once Had Is No Longer Valid? In Modern Times An Idea Can Be Refuted, Yes, But Not Retracted.

Common European Thought Is The Fruit Of The Immense Toil Of Translators. Without Translators, Europe Would Not Exist; Translators Are More Important Than Members Of The European Parliament.

There Are Moments In Life When A Man Retreats Defensively, When He Must Give Ground, When He Must Surrender Less Important Positions In Order To Protect The More Important Ones. But Should It Come To The Very Last, The Most Important One, At This Point A Man Must Halt And Stand Firm If He Doesn't Want To Begin Life All Over Again With Idle Hands And A Feeling Of Being Shipwrecked.

Living, There Is No Happiness In That. Living: Carrying One’s Painful Self Through The World. But Being, Being Is Happiness. Being: Becoming A Fountain, A Fountain On Which The Universe Falls Like Warm Rain.

For Everyone Is Pained By The Thought Of Disappearing, Unheard And Unseen, Into An Indifferent Universe, And Because Of That Everyone Wants, While There Is Still Time, To Turn Himself Into A Universe Of Words.

Culture Is Perishing In Overproduction, In An Avalanche Of Words, In The Madness Of Quantity.

Sad Company Is Bad Company.

The Characters In My Novels Are My Own Unrealised Possibilities. That Is Why I Am Equally Fond Of Them All And Equally Horrified By Them. Each One Has Crossed A Border That I Myself Have Circumvented.

The Day After His Father Left, Franz And His Mother Went Into Town Together, And As They Left Home Franz Noticed That Her Shoes Did Not Match. He Was In A Quandary: He Wanted To Point Out The Mistake, But Was Afraid He Would Hurt Her. So, During The Two Hours They Spent Walking Through The City Together He Kept His Eyes Focused On Her Feet. It Was Then He Had His First Inkling Of What It Means To Suffer.

Anyone Whose Goal Is 'something Higher' Must Expect Someday To Suffer Vertigo.

There Is Such A Thing As Everyday, Ordinary, Vulgar Ecstasy; The Ecstasy Of Anger, The Ecstasy Of Speed At The Wheel, The Ecstasy Of Ear-splitting Noise, Ecstasy In The Soccer Stadium.

Just Imagine Living In A World Without Mirrors. You'd Dream About Your Face And Imagine It As An Outer Reflection Of What Is Inside You. And Then, When You Reached Forty, Someone Put A Mirror Before You For The First Time In Your Life. Imagine Your Fright! You'd See The Face Of A Stranger. And You'd Know Quite Clearly What You Are Unable To Grasp: Your Face Is Not You.

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.

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

For Sabina, Living In Truth, Lying Neither To Ourselves Nor To Others, Was Possible Only Away From The Public: The Moment Someone Keeps An Eye On What We Do, We Involuntarily Make Allowances For That Eye, And Nothing We Do Is Truthful. Having A Public, Keeping A Public In Mind, Means Living In Lies.

The Idea Of Eternal Return Is A Mysterious One, And Nietzsche Has Often Perplexed Other Philosophers With It: To Think That Everything Recurs As We Once Experienced It, And That The Recurrence Itself Recurs Ad Infinitum! What Does This Mad Myth Signify?

Only The Basic Situations In Life Occur Only Once, Never To Return. For A Man To Be A Man, He Must Be Fully Aware Of This Never-to-return. (p.148)

Situations In Life

The Longing For Order Is At The Same Time A Longing For Death, Because Life Is An Incessant Disruption Of Order.

Dogs Are Our Link To Paradise.

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

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

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.

The Stupidity Of People Comes From Having An Answer For Everything. The Wisdom Of The Novel Comes From Having A Question For Everything.

But When The Strong Were Too Weak To Hurt The Weak, The Weak Had To Be Strong Enough To Leave.

Her Drama Was A Drama Not Of Heaviness But Of Lightness. What Fell To Her Lot Was Not The Burden But The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.

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.

When Graves Are Covered With Stones, The Dead Can No Longer Get Out. But The Dead Can't Go Out Anyway! What Difference Does It Make Whether They're Covered With Soil Or Stones?

For A Novelist, A Given Historic Situation Is An Anthropologic Laboratory In Which He Explores His Basic Question: What Is Human Existence?

High Culture Is Nothing But A Child Of That European Perversion Called History, The Obsession We Have With Going Forward, With Considering The Sequence Of Generations A Relay Race In Which Everyone Surpasses His Predecessor, Only To Be Surpassed By His Successor. Without This Relay Race Called History There Would Be No European Art And What Characterizes It: A Longing For Originality, A Longing For Change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, They're All Runners In The Relay Race, They All Belong To The Same Stadium.

A Great Deal Has Been Said About Love At First Sight; I Am Perfectly Aware Of Love's Retrospective Tendency To Make A Legend Of Itself, Turn Its Beginnings Into Myth; So I Don't Want To Assert That It Was Love; But I Have No Doubt There Was A Kind Of Clairvoyance At Work: I Immediately Felt, Sensed, Grasped The Essence Of Lucie's Being Or, To Be More Precise, The Essence Of What She Was Later To Become For Me; Lucie Had Revealed Herself To Me The Way Religious Truth Reveals Itself.

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.

Einmal Ist Keinmal, Says Tomas To Himself. What Happens But Once, Says The German Adage, Might As Well Not Have Happened At All. If We Have Only One Life To Live, We Might As Well Not Have Lived At All.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Without The Meditative Background That Is Criticism, Works Become Isolated Gestures, Historical Accidents, Soon Forgotten.

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.

The Man Hunched Over His Motorcycle Can Focus Only On The Present... He Is Caught In A Fragment Of Time Cut Off From Both The Past And The Future... He Has No Fear, Because The Source Of Fear Is In The Future, And A Person Freed Of The Future Has Nothing To Fear.

Metaphors Are Dangerous. Metaphors Are Not To Be Trifled With.

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.

The Ludicrous Element In Our Feeling Does Not Make Them Any Less Authentic.

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Now Time Has A Very Different Look; It Is No Longer The Conquering Present Capturing The Future; It Is The Present Conquered And Captured And Carried Off By The Past.

Hate Traps Us By Binding Us Too Tightly To Our Adversary.

We Go Through The Present Blindfolded... Only Later, When The Blindfold Is Removed And We Examine The Past, Do We Realize What We've Been Through And Understand What It Means.

The Characters In My Novels Are My Own Unrealized Possibilities. That Is Why I Am Equally Fond Of Them All And Equally Horrified By Them. Each One Has Crossed A Border That I Myself Have Circumvented. It Is That Crossed Border (the Border Beyond Which My Own "i" Ends) Which Attracts Me Most. For Beyond That Border Begins The Secret The Novel Asks About. This Novel Is Not The Author's Confession; It Is An Investigation Of Human Life In The Trap The World Has Become.

In Tereza's Eyes, Books Were The Emblems Of A Secret Brotherhood

This Is The Real And The Only Reason For Friendship: To Provide A Mirror So The Other Person Can Contemplate His Image From The Past, Which, Without The Eternal Blah-blah Of Memories Between Pals, Would Long Ago Have Disappeared.

Being In A Foreign Country Means Walking A Tightrope High Above The Ground Without The Net Afforded A Person By The Country Where He Has His Family, Colleagues, And Friends, And Where He Can Easily Say What He Has To Say In A Language He Has Known From Childhood.

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.

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

Finding Yourself

If We Cannot Accept The Importance Of The World, Which Considers Itself Important, If In The Midst Of That World Our Laughter Finds No Echo, We Have But One Choice: To Take The World As A Whole And Make It The Object Of Our Game; To Turn It Into A Toy

Young Is The One That Plunges In The Future And Never Looks Back.

It Was Futile To Attack With Reason The Stout Wall Of Irrational Feelings That, As Is Known, Is The Stuff Of Which The Female Mind Is Made.

I Am Not In Favor Of Imposing Happiness On People. Everyone Has A Right To His Bad Wine, To His Stupidity, And To His Dirty Fingernails.

The Best Actors Do Not Let The Wheels Show.

Eroticism Is Like A Dance: One Always Leads The Other.

People Fascinated By The Idea Of Progress Never Suspect That Every Step Forward Is Also A Step On The Way To The End.

I Find Myself Fascinating.

When We Ignore The Body, We Are More Easily Victimized By It.

A Man Is Responsible For His Ignorance.

Listening To A News Broadcast Is Like Smoking A Cigarette And Crushing The Butt In The Ashtray.

Perhaps All The Questions We Ask Of Love, To Measure, Test, Probe, And Save It, Have The Additional Effect Of Cutting It Short.

The Eye... The Point Where A Person's Identity Is Concentrated.

Yes, The Essence Of Every Love Is A Child, And It Makes No Difference At All Whether It Has Ever Actually Been Conceived Or Born. In The Algebra Of Love A Child Is The Symbol Of The Magical Sum Of Two Beings.

To Laugh Is To Live Profoundly.

No Matter How Much We Scorn It, Kitsch Is An Integral Part Of The Human Condition.

Human Condition

Mankind's Real Moral Test, A Test So Radical And So Deep That It Escapes Our Gaze, Is Probably The One Of Its Relations With Those That Are The Most At Its Mercy; The Animals.

...[p]eople Who Shout Joy From The Rooftops Are Often The Saddest Of All... (p.24)

The Novel Is A Meditation On Existence As Seen Through The Medium Of Imaginary Characters.

In The Sunset Of Dissolution, Everything Is Illuminated By The Aura Of Nostalgia, Even The Guillotine.

Since The Insignificance Of All Things Is Our Lot, We Should Not Bear It As An Affliction But Learn To Enjoy It.

She Had An Overwhelming Desire To Tell Him, Like The Most Banal Of Women. Don't Let Me Go, Hold Me Tight, Make Me Your Plaything, Your Slave, Be Strong! But They Were Words She Could Not Say. The Only Thing She Said When He Released Her From His Embrace Was, "you Don't Know How Happy I Am To Be With You." That Was The Most Her Reserved Nature Allowed Her To Express.

Overwhelming Desire

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

When You Sit Face To Face With Someone Who Is Pleasant, Respectful, And Polite, You Have Hard Time Reminding Yourself That Nothing He Says Is True/sincere.

I Was Not A Hypocrite, With One Real Face And Several False Ones. I Had Several Faces Because I Was Young And Didn't Know Who I Was Or Wanted To Be.

Great Novels Are Always A Little More Intelligent Than Their Authors.

If I Had Two Lives, In One Life I Could Invite Her To Stay At My Place, And In The Second Life I Could Kick Her Out. Then I Could Compare And See Which Had Been The Best Thing To Do. But We Only Live Once. Life's So Light. Like An Outline We Can't Ever Fill In Or Correct... Make Any Better. It's Frightening".

Mysticism And Exaggeration Go Together. A Mystic Must Not Fear Ridicule If He Is To Push All The Way To The Limits Of Humility Or The Limits Of Delight.

Exaggeration Is

There Would Seem To Be Nothing More Obvious, More Tangible And Palpable Than The Present Moment. And Yet It Eludes Us Completely. All The Sadness Of Life Lies In That Fact. In The Course Of A Single Second, Our Senses Of Sight, Of Hearing, Of Smell, Register (knowingly Or Not) A Swarm Of Events And A Parade Of Sensations And Ideas Passes Through Our Head. Each Instant Represents A Little Universe, Irrevocably Forgotten In The Next Instant.

And There Lies The Horror: The Past We Remember Is Devoid Of Time. Impossible To Reexperience A Love The Way We Reread A Book Or Resee A Film.

La Memoria No Guarda Películas, Guarda Fotografías.

In The Political Jargon Of Those Days, The Word "intellectual" Was An Insult. It Indicated Someone Who Did Not Understand Life And Was Cut Off From The People. All The Communists Who Were Hanged At The Time By Other Communists Were Awarded Such Abuse. Unlike Those Who Had Their Feet Solidly On The Ground, They Were Said To Float In The Air. So It Was Fair, In A Way, That As Punishment The Ground Was Permanently Pulled Out From Under Their Feet, That They Remained Suspended A Little Above The Floor.

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.

No One Can Get Really Drunk On A Novel Or A Painting, But Who Can Help Getting Drunk On Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata For Two Pianos And Percussion, Or The Reatles' White Album?

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.

Youth Is Terrible: It Is A Stage Trod By Children In Buskins And A Variety Of Costumes Mouthing Speeches They've Memorized And Fanatically Believe But Only Half Understand. And History Is Terrible Because It So Often Ends Up A Playground For The Immature; A Playground For The Young Nero, A Playground For The Young Bonaparte, A Playground For The Easily Roused Mobs Of Children Whose Simulated Passions And Simplistic Poses Suddenly Metamorphose Into A Catastrophically Real Reality.

In Eroticism As Dance: One Of The Partners Is Always Charged With Leading The Other.

Only Animals Were Not Expelled From Paradise.

Her Kitsch Was The Image Of Home, All Peace, Quiet, And Harmony, And Ruled By A Loving Mother And A Wise Father. It Was An Image That Took Shape In Her After The Death Of Her Parents. The Less Her Life Resembled The Sweetest Of Dreams, The More Sensitive She Was To Its Magic, And More Than Once She Shed Tears When The Ungrateful Daughter In A Sentimental Film Embraced The Neglected Father As The Windows Of The Happy Family's House Shone Out Into The Dying Day.

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.

I Have No Mission. No One Has.

I Want You To Be Weak. As Weak As I Am.

When She Is Older She Will See In These Resemblances A Regrettable Uniformity Among Individuals (they All Stop At The Same Spots To Kiss, Have The Same Tastes In Clothing, Flatter A Woman With The Same Metaphor) And A Tedious Monotony Among Events (they Are All Just An Endless Repetition Of The Same One); But In Her Adolescence She Welcomes These Coincidences As Miraculous And She Is Avid To Decipher Their Meanings.

The Heaviest Of Burdens Is Simultaneously An Image Of Life's Most Intense Fullfillment. The Heavier The Burden, The Closer Our Lives Come To The Earth, The More Real And Truthful They Become. Conversely, The Absolute Absence Of A Burden Causes Man To Be Lighter Than Air, To Soar Into New Heights, Take Leave Of The Earth And His Earthly Being, And Become Only Half Real, His Movements As Free As They Are Insignificant. What Then Shall We Choose? Weight Or Lightness?

And Therein Lies The Whole Of Man's Plight. Human Time Does Not Turn In A Circle; It Runs Ahead In A Straight Line. That Is Why Man Cannot Be Happy: Happiness Is The Longing For Repetition.

Kitsch Causes Two Tears To Flow In Quick Succession. The First Tear Says: How Nice To See Children Running On The Grass! The Second Tear Says: How Nice To Be Moved, Together With All Mankind, By Children Running On The Grass!

Fortunately, I Read (the Books) Without Knowing What I Was In For, And The Best Thing That Can Ever Happen To A Reader Happened To Me: I Loved Something That, By Conviction (or By My Nature) I Should Not Have Loved

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?

Business Only Has Two Functions - Innovation And Marketing.

Oh Lovers! Be Careful In Those Dangerous First Days! Once You've Brought Breakfast In Bed You'll Have To Bring It Forever, Unless You Want To Be Accused Of Lovelessness And Betrayal.

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

Revolution In Love’. Can You Tell Me What You Mean By That? Do You Want Free Love As Against Bourgeois Marriage, Or Monogamy As Against Bourgeois Promiscuity?

The Goals We Pursue Are Always Veiled. A Girl Who Longs For Marriage Longs For Something She Knows Nothing About. The Boy Who Hankers After Fame Has No Idea What Fame Is. The Thing That Gives Our Every Move Its Meaning Is Always Totally Unknown To Us.

I Have A Strong Will To Love You For Eternity.

There Is No Means Of Testing Which Decision Is Better, Because There Is No Basis For Comparison. We Live Everything As It Comes, Without Warning, Like An Actor Going On Cold. And What Can Life Be Worth If The First Rehearsal For Life Is Life Itself? That Is Why Life Is Always Like A Sketch. No, "sketch" Is Not Quite A Word, Because A Sketch Is An Outline Of Something, The Groundwork For A Picture, Whereas The Sketch That Is Our Life Is A Sketch For Nothing, An Outline With No Picture.

Sensuality Is The Total Mobilization Of The Senses: An Individual Observes His Partner Intently, Straining To Catch Every Sound.

All Great Novels, All True Novels, Are Bisexual.

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

His Overriding Life Necessity Was Not Love, It Was His Profession…he Had Come To Medicine Not By Coincidence Or Calculation But By A Deep Inner Desire. Insofar As It Is Possible To Divide People Into Categories, The Surest Criterion Is The Deep-seated Desires That Orient Them To One Or Another Lifelong Activity. Every Frenchman Is Different. But All The Actors The World Over Are Similar.

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

Two People In Love, Alone, Isolated From The World, That's Beautiful.

Darling, My Darling, Don't Think That I Don't Love You Or That I Didn't Love You, But It's Precisely Because I Love You That I Couldn't Have Become What I Am Today If You Were Still Here. It's Impossible To Have A Child And Despise The World As It Is, Because That's The World We've Put The Child Into. The Child Makes Us Care About The World, Think About It's Future, Willingly Join In Its Racket And Its Turmoils, Take Its Incurable Stupidity Seriously.

Yes, It's A Well-known Fact About You: You're Like Death, You Take Everything.

Today I Know This: When It Comes Time To Take Stock, The Most Painful Wound Is That Of Broken Friendships; And There Is Nothing More Foolish Than To Sacrifice A Friendship To Politics.

The Body Was A Cage, And Inside That Cage Was Something Which Looked, Listened, Feared, Thought And Marveled; That Something, That Remainder Left Over After The Body Had Been Accounted For, Was The Soul.

Yes, It Was Too Late, And Sabina Knew She Would Leave Paris, Move On, And On Again, Because Were She To Die Here They Would Cover Her Up With A Stone, And In The Mind Of A Woman For Whom No Place Is Home The Thought Of An End To All Flight Is Unbearable.

Let Us Consider The Critic, Therefore, As A Discoverer Of Discoveries.

All Lovers Unconsciously Establish Their Own Rules Of The Game, Which From The Outset Admit Of No Transgression.

Rules Of The Game

My Lifelong Ambition Has Been To Unite The Utmost Seriousness Of Question With The Utmost Lightness Of Form.

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.

A Route Differs From A Road Not Only Because It Is Solely Intended For Vehicles, But Also Because It Is Merely A Line That Connects One Point With Another. A Route Has No Meaning In Itself; Its Meaning Derives Entirely From The Two Points That It Connects. A Road Is A Tribute To Space. Every Stretch Of Road Has Meaning In Itself And Invites Us To Stop. A Route Is The Triumphant Devaluation Of Space, Which Thanks To It Has Been Reduced To A Mere Obstacle To Human Movement And A Waste Of Time.

There Are Metaphysical Problems, Problems Of Human Existence, That Philosophy Has Never Known How To Grasp In All Their Concreteness And That Only The Novel Can Seize.

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.

But Deep Down She Said To Herself, Franz Maybe Strong, But His Strength Is Directed Outward; When It Comes To The People He Lives With, The People He's Loves, He's Weak. Franz's Weakness Is Called Goodness. Franz Would Never Give Sabina Orders. He Would Never Command Her, As Tomas Had, To Lay The Mirror On The Floor And Walk Back And Forth On It Naked. Not That He Lacks Sensuality; He Simply Lacks The Strength To Give Orders. There Are Things That Can Be Accomplished Only By Violence. Physical Love Is Unthinkable Without Violence.

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.

Dreaming Is Not Merely An Act Of Communication; It Is Also An Aesthetic Activity, A Game Of The Imagination, A Game That Is A Value In Itself.

I Feel A Frantic Desire To Free Myself. To Start All Over Again And In Another Way.

Love Is A Battle, And I Plan To Go On Fighting. To The End.

She Knew That There Were All Kinds Of Ways To Make A Conquest And That One Of The Surest Roads To A Woman's Genitals Was Through Her Sadness.

Noise Has One Advantage. It Drowns Out Words.

People Derived Too Much Pleasure From Seeing Their Fellow Man Morally Humiliated To Spoil That Pleasure By Hearing Out An Explanation.

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.

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.)

Immortality No Longer Interests The Weary Old Man At All.

Those Boobs Of Yours Are Ubiquitous - Like God!

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

Beauty Is A Rebellion Against Time.

The Longing For Paradise Is Man's Longing Not To Be Man.

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

Bacon's Portraits Are An Interrogation On The Limits Of The Self. Up To What Degree Of Distortion Does An Individual Still Remain Himself? To What Degree Of Distortion Does A Beloved Person Still Remain A Beloved Person? For How Long Does A Cherished Face Growing Remote Through Illness, Through Madness, Through Hatred, Through Death Still Remain Recognizable? Where Is The Border Beyond Which A Self Ceases To Be A Self?

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

The First Step In Liquidating A People Is To Erase Its Memory. Destroy Its Books, Its Culture, Its History.

Flirting Is A Promise Of Sexual Intercourse Without A Guarantee.

Ambition Is A Poor Excuse For Not Having Sense Enough To Be Lazy.

Loves Are Like Empires: When The Idea They Are Founded On Crumbles, They, Too, Fade Away.

In The Mind Of A Woman For Whom No Place Is Home The Thought Of An End To All Flight Is Unbearable.

Extremism Means Borders Beyond Which Life Ends, And A Passion For Extremism, In Art And In Politics, Is A Veiled Longing For Death.

Necessity, Weight, And Value Are Three Concepts Inextricably Bound: Only Necessity Is Heavy, And Only What Is Heavy Has Value.

The River Flowed From Century To Century, And Human Affairs Play Themselves Out On Its Banks. Play Themselves Out To Be Forgotten The Next Day, While The River Flows On.

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

Suspending Moral Judgment Is Not The Immorality Of The Novel; It Is Its Morality. The Morality That Stands Against The Ineradicable Human Habit Of Judging Instantly, Ceaselessly, And Everyone; Of Judging Before, And In The Absence Of, Understanding. From The Viewpoint Of The Novel's Wisdom, That Fervid Readiness To Judge Is The Most Detestable Stupidity, The Most Pernicious Evil.

If I Hadn't Met You, I'd Certainly Have Fallen In Love With Him.

To Rebel Against Being Born A Woman Seemed As Foolish To Her As To Take Pride In It.

...she Merely Wished To Find A Way Out Of The Maze. She Knew That She Had Become A Burden To Him: She Took Things Too Seriously, Turning Everything Into A Tragedy, And Failed To Grasp The Lightness And Amusing Insignificance Of Physical Love. How She Wished She Could Learn Lightness! She Yearned For Someone To Help Her Out Of Her Anachronistic Shell.

We Can Never Know What To Want, Because, Living Only One Life, We Can Neither Compare It With Our Previous Lives Nor Perfect It In Our Lives To Come.

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

The Serial Number Of A Human Specimen Is The Face, That Accidental And Unrepeatable Combination Of Features. It Reflects Neither Character Nor Soul, Nor What We Call The Self. The Face Is Only The Serial Number Of A Specimen

But Just Make Someone Who Has Fallen In Love Listen To His Stomach Rumble, And The Unity Of Body And Soul, That Lyrical Illusion Of The Age Of Science , Instantly Fades Away.

In Her Presence I Could Dare Everything: Sincerity, Emotion, Pathos.

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

At The End Of True Love Is Death, And Only The Love That Ends In Death Is Love.

Anyone Who Thinks That The Communist Regimes Of Central Europe Are Exclusively The Work Of Criminals Is Overlooking A Basic Truth: The Criminal Regimes Were Made Not By Criminals But By Enthusiasts Convinced They Had Discovered The Only Road To Paradise. They Defended That Road So Valiantly That They Were Forced To Execute Many People. Later It Became Clear That There Was No Paradise, That The Enthusiasts Were Therefore Murderers.

Unlike The Puerile Loyalty To A Conviction, Loyalty To A Friend Is A Virtue - Perhaps The Only Virtue, The Last Remaining One.

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

Definition Of Love

A Mismatched Outfit, A Slightly Defective Denture, An Exquisite Mediocrity Of The Soul-those Are The Details That Make A Woman Real, Alive. The Women You See On Posters Or In Fashion Magazines-the Ones All The Women Try To Imitate Nowadays-how Can They Be Attractive? They Have No Reality Of Their Own; They're Just The Sum Of A Set Of Abstract Rules. They Aren't Born Of Human Bodies; They Hatch Ready-made From The Computers." ~the Book Of Laughter And Forgetting

...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.

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

Metaphors Are Dangerous. Love Begins With A Metaphor

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

...he Took A Look At The Blond Girl's Eyes And Knew That He Must Not Take Part In The Rigged Game In Which The Ephemeral Passes For The Eternal And The Small For The Big, That He Must Not Take Part In The Rigged Game Called Love.

The Only Reason People Want To Be Masters Of The Future Is To Change The Past.

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.

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.

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.

Children, Never Look Back!" And This Meant That We Must Never Allow The Future To Be Weighed Down By Memory . For Children Have No Past, And That Is The Whole Secret Of The Magical Innocence Of Their Smiles.

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

Pain Doesn't Listen To Reason, It Has It's Own Reason, Which Is Not Reasonable

We Live Everything As It Comes, Without Warning, Like An Actor Going On Cold.

[w]e Must Never Allow The Future To Collapse Under The Burden Of Memory.

Leroy Interrupted Chantal's Fantasies: "freedom? As You Live Our Your Desolation, You Can Be Either Unhappy Or Happy. Having That Choice Is What Constitutes Your Freedom. You're Free To Melt Your Own Individuality Into The Cauldron Of The Multitude Either With A Feeling Of Defeat Or Euphoria.

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

A Person Who Longs To Leave The Place Where He Lives Is An Unhappy Person.

Aren't We Living In A World Where Heedless Men Only Desire Decapitated Women?

We All Reject Out Of Hand The Idea That The Love Of Our Life May Be Something Light Or Weightless; We Presume Our Love Is What Must Be, That Without It Our Life Would No Longer Be The Same; We Feel That Beethoven Himself, Gloomy And Awe-inspiring, Is Playing The “es Muss Sein!” To Our Own Great Love.

When We Want To Give Expression To A Dramatic Situation In Our Lives, We Tend To Use Metaphors Of Heaviness. We Say That Something Has Become A Great Burden To Us. We Either Bear The Burden Or Fail And Go Down With It, We Struggle With It, Win Or Lose. And Sabina - What Had Come Over Her? Nothing. She Had Left A Man Because She Felt Like Leaving Him. Had He Persecuted Her? Had He Tried To Take Revenge On Her? No. Her Drama Was A Drama Not Of Heaviness But Of Lightness. What Fell To Her Lot Was Not The Burden, But The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.

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.

A Man Able To Think Isn't Defeated - Even When He Is Defeated.

Children Are The Future, Because Mankind Is Moving More And More Towards Infancy.

Living Is Being Happy: Seeing, Hearing, Touching, Drinking, Eating, Urinating, Defecating, Diving Into The Water And Gazing At The Sky, Laughing And Crying.

...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. Can You Tell Me What Kind Of Day Can Follow A Beginning Of Such Violence? What Happens To People Whose Alarm Clock Daily Gives Them A Small Electric Shock? Each Day They Become More Used To Violence And Less Used To Pleasure.

Joking Is A Barrier Between Man And The World. Joking Is The Enemy Of Love And Poetry.

Looking Out Over The Courtyard At The Dirty Walls, He Realized He Had No Idea Whether It Was Hysteria Or Love.

The Worst Thing Is Not That The World Is Unfree, But That People Have Unlearned Their Liberty.

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

Laughter, On The Other Hand, " Petrarch Went On, "is An Explosion That Tears Us Away From The World And Throws Us Back Into Our Own Cold Solitude. Joking Is A Barrier Between Man And The World. Joking Is The Enemy Of Love And Poetry. That's Why I Tell You Yet Again, And You Want To Keep In Mind: Boccaccio Doesn't Understand Love. Love Can Never Be Laughable. Love Has Nothing In Common With Laughter.

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