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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?

-Milan Kundera

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What I Love In

Milan Kundera

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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?

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Living For Sabina Meant Seeing. Seeing Is Limited By Two Borders: Strong Light, Which Blinds, And Total Darkness. Perhaps That Was What Motivated Sabina's Distaste For All Extremism. Extremes Mean Borders Beyond Which Life Ends, And A Passion For Extremism, In Art And In Politics, Is A Veiled Longing For Death.

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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.

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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

And I Ran After That Voice Through The Streets So As Not To Lose Sight Of The Splendid Wreath Of Bodies Gliding Over The City, And I Realized With Anguish In My Heart That They Were Flying Like Birds And I Was Falling Like A Stone, That They Had Wings And I Would Never Have Any.

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Our Dreams Prove That To Imagine - To Dream About Things That Have Not Happened - Is Among Mankind's Deepest Needs.

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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.)

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

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.

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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?

The Combination Of A Frivolous Form And A Serious Subject Immediately Unmasks The Truth About Our Dramas.

Serious Subjects

I Cannot Hate Them Because Nothing Binds Me To Them; I Have Nothing In Common With Them.

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

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Self Confidence

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Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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I Have To Lie, If I Don't Want To Take Madmen Seriously And Become A Madman Myself

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Questions And Answers

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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?

But Isn't It True That An Author Can Write Only About Himself?

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!

Believe Me, Nothing Is More Beautiful Than To Carry Out Crazy Ideas. I'd Like My Whole Life To Be One Single Crazy Idea.

A Man Who Loses His Privacy Loses Everything. And A Man Who Gives It Up Of His Own Free Will Is A Monster.

The History Of Music Is Mortal, But The Idiocy Of The Guitar Is Eternal.

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

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

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.

A Worker May Be The Hammer's Master, But The Hammer Still Prevails. A Tool Knows Exactly How It Is Meant To Be Handled, While The User Of The Tool Can Only Have An Approximate Idea.

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

Remembering Our Past, Carrying It Around With Us Always, May Be The Necessary Requirement For Maintaining, As They Say, The Wholeness Of The Self. To Ensure That The Self Doesn’t Shrink, To See That It Holds On To Its Volume, Memories Have To Be Watered Like Potted Flowers, And The Watering Calls For Regular Contact With The Witnesses Of The Past, That Is To Say, With Friends. They Are Our Mirror; Our Memory; We Ask Nothing Of Them But That They Polish The Mirror From Time To Time So We Can Look At Ourselves In It.

Beauty Has Long Since Disappeared. It Has Slipped Beneath The Surface Of The Noise, The Noise Of Words, Sunk Deep As Atlantis. The Only Thing Left Of It Is The Word, Whose Meaning Loses Clarity From Year To Year.

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

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.

Love Is A Desire For That Lost Half Of Ourselves.

Nothing Is More Repugnant To Me Than Brotherly Feelings Grounded In The Common Baseness People See In One Another.

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 . . .

She Loved To Walk Down The Street With A Book Under Her Arm. It Had The Same Significance For Her As An Elegant Cane For The Dandy A Century Ago. It Differentiated Her From Others.

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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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The Border Between Good And Evil Is Terribly Fuzzy.

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.

How Goodness Heightens Beauty!

Sometimes You Make Up Your Mind About Something Without Knowing Why, And Your Decision Persists By The Power Of Inertia. Every Year It Gets Harder To Change.

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.

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.

To Laugh Is To Live Profoundly.

I Think, Therefore I Am' Is The Statement Of An Intellectual Who Underrates Toothaches.

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.

How Could She Feel Nostalgia When He Was Right In Front Of Her? How Can You Suffer From The Absence Of A Person Who Is Present? You Can Suffer Nostalgia In The Presence Of The Beloved If You Glimpse A Future Where The Beloved Is No More.

The Greek Word For "return" Is Nostos. Algos Means "suffering." So Nostalgia Is The Suffering Caused By An Unappeased Yearning To Return.

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

Our Historical Experience Teaches Us That Men Imitate One Another, That Their Attitudes Are Statistically Calculable, Their Opinions Manipulable, And That Man Is Therefore Less An Individual (a Subject) Than An Element In A Mass.

Speak Truth To Power.

Speak The Truth

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

Noise Has One Advantage. It Drowns Out Words.

Dogs Are Our Link To Paradise. They Don't Know Evil Or Jealousy Or Discontent.

Beauty Is A Rebellion Against Time.

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.

Tereza Had Gone Back To Sleep; He Could Not. He Pictured Her Death. She Was Dead And Having Terrible Nightmares; But Because She Was Dead, He Was Unable To Wake Her From Them. Yes, That Is Death: Tereza Asleep, Having Terrible Nightmares, And He Unable To Wake Her.

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

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.

I Have A Strong Will To Love You For Eternity.

She Had Come To Him To Escape Her Mother's World, A World Where All Bodies Were Equal. She Had Come To Him To Make Her Body Unique, Irreplaceble. But He, Too Had Drawn An Equal Sign Between Her And The Rest Of Them: He Kissed Them All Alike, Stroked Them All Alike, Made No, Absolutely No Distiction Between Tereza's Body And The Other Bodies. He Sent Her Back To The World She Tried To Escape, Sent To March Naked With The Other Naked Women

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.

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.

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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.

Nudity Is The Uniform Of The Other Side... Nudity Is A Shroud.

When A Private Talk Over A Bottle Of Wine Is Broadcast On The Radio, What Can It Mean But That The World Is Turning Into A Concentration Camp?

The Reason Is That Everyone Has Trouble Accepting The Fact That He Will Disappear Unheard Of And Unnoticed In An Indifferent Universe, And Everyone Wants To Make Himself Into A Universe Of Words Before It's Too Late. Once The Writer In Every Individual Comes To Life (and That Time Is Not Far Off), We Are In For An Age Of Universal Deafness And Lack Of Understanding.

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

The Greater The Ambiguity, The Greater The Pleasure.

Given The Nature Of The Human Couple, The Love Of A Man And A Woman Is A Priori Inferior To That Which Can Exist (at Least In The Best Instances) In The Love Between Man And Dog...it Is A Completely Selfless Love.

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.

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

Metaphors Are Dangerous. Love Begins With A Metaphor

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Through The Air Floated Only Important Words, And Flajsman Said To Himself That Love Has But One True Measure, And That Is Death. At The End Of True Love Is Death, And Only The Love That Ends In Death Is Love.

The Irresistible Proliferation Of Graphomania Shows Me That Everyone Without Exception Bears A Potential Writer Within Him, So That The Entire Human Species Has Good Reason To Go Down Into The Streets And Shout: We Are All Writers! 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. One Morning (and It Will Be Soon), When Everyone Wakes Up As A Writer, The Age Of Universal Deafness And Incomprehension Will Have Arrived.

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

Remembering Now All Those Farewells (fake Farewells, Worked-up Farewells), Irena Thinks: A Person Who Messes Up Her Goodbyes Shouldn’t Expect Much From Her Re-unions.

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

Dreaming Is Not Merely An Act Of Communication (or Coded Communication, If You Like); It Is Also An Aesthetic Activity, A Game Of The Imagination, A Game That Is A Value In Itself. Our Dreams Prove That To Imagine--to Dream About Things That Have Not Happened--is Among Mankind's Deepest Needs. Herein Lies The Danger. If Dreams Were Not Beautiful, They Would Be Quickly Forgotten.

A Man Possessed With Peace Is Always Smiling

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

If Our Planet Has Seen Some Eighty Billion People It Is Difficult To Suppose Hat Every Individual Has Had His Or Her Own Repertory Of Gestures. Arithmetically, It Is Simply Impossible. Without The Slightest Doubt, There Are Far Fewer Gestures In The World Than There Are Individuals. That Finding Leads Us To A Shocking Conclusion: A Gesture Is More Individual Than An Individual. We Could Put It In The Form Of An Aphorism: Many People, Few Gestures.

A Constant Interrogation.

Laughing Deeply Is Living Deeply.

Solitude: A Sweet Absence Of Looks.

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.

All Previous Crimes Of The Russian Empire Had Been Committed Under The Cover Of A Discreet Shadow. The Deportation Of A Million Lithuanians, The Murder Of Hundreds Of Thousands Of Poles, The Liquidation Of The Crimean Tatars Remain In Our Memory, But No Photographic Documentation Exists; Sooner Or Later They Will Therefore Be Proclaimed As Fabrications.

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.

A Man Is Responsible For His Ignorance.

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

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.

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)

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

This Symmetrical Composition--the Same Motif At The Beginning And At The End--may Seem Quite "novelistic" To You, And I Am Willing To Agree, But Only On Condition That You Refrain From Reading Such Notions As "fictive," "fabricated," And "untrue To Life" Into The Word "novelistic." Because Human Lives Are Composed In Precisely Such A Fashion.

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.

A Single Metaphor Can Give Birth To Love.

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

When His Wife Was At His Side, She Was Also In Front Of Him, Marking Out The Horizon Of His Life. Now The Horizon Is Empty: The View Has Changed.

Once The Writer In Every Individual Comes To Life (and That Time Is Not Far Off), We Are In For An Age Of Universal Deafness And Lack Of Understanding.

Perhaps The Reason We Are Unable To Love Is That We Yearn To Be Loved, That Is, We Demand Something - Love - From Our Partner Instead Of Delivering Ourselves Up To Him Demand-free And Asking For Nothing But His Company.

Physical Love Is Unthinkable Without Violence.

Human Life Occurs Only Once, And The Reason We Cannot Determine Which Of Our Decisions Are Good And Which Bad Is That In A Given Situation We Can Make Only One Decision; We Are Not Granted A Second, Third, Or Fourth Life In Which To Compare Various Decisions.

I Understood That There Was No Escaping The Memories, That I Was Surround By Them. (p.30)

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.

At A Time When History Made Its Way Slowly, The Few Events Were Easily Remembered And Woven Into A Backdrop, Known To Everyone, Before Which Private Life Unfolded The Gripping Show Of Its Adventures. Nowadays, Time Moves Forward At A Rapid Pace. Forgotten Overnight, A Historic Event Glistens The Next Day Like The Morning Dew And Thus Is No Longer The Backdrop To A Narrator's Tale But Rather An Amazing Adventure Enacted Against The Background Of The Over-familiar Banality Of Private Life.

And She Realized That She (her Soul) Was Not At All Involved, Only Her Body, Her Body Alone. The Body That Had Betrayed Her And That She Had Sent Out Into The World Among Other Bodies.

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.

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.

Perhaps If They Had Stayed Together Longer, Sabina And Franz Would Have Begun To Understand The Words They Used. Gradually, Timorously, Their Vocabularies Would Have Come Together, Like Bashful Lovers, And The Music Of One Would Have Begun To Intersect With The Music Of The Other. But It Was Too Late Now.

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.

For Existential Mathematics, Which Does Not Exist, Would Probably Propose This Equation: The Value Of Coincidence Equals The Degree Of Its Improbability.

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.

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.

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

The Senator Had Only One Argument In His Favour: His Feeling. When The Heart Speaks, The Mind Finds It Indecent To Object. In The Realm Of Kitsch, The Dictatorship Of The Heart Reigns Supreme.

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

The Worth Of A Human Being Lies In The Ability To Extend Oneself, To Go Outside Oneself, To Exist In And For Other People.

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.

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.

Yes, It's Crazy. Love Is Either Crazy Or It's Nothing At All.

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.

Suspending Moral Judgment Is Not The Immorality Of The Novel; It Is Its Morality.

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

Dogs Are Our Link To Paradise.

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.

As You Live Out Your Desolation, You Can Be Either Unhappy Or Happy. Having That Choice Is What Constitutes Your Freedom.

I Understand You, And I Shall Not Attempt To Make You Change Your Mind. I Am Too Old To Want To Improve The World. I Have Told You What I Think, And That Is All. I Shall Remain Your Friend Even If You Act Contrary To My Convictions, And I Shall Help You Even If I Disagree With You.

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?

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.

I Remember That The Day I Finished 'the Angels,' Part Three Of 'the Book Of Laughter And Forgetting', I Was Terribly Proud Of Myself. I Was Sure That I Had Discovered The Key To A New Way Of Putting Together A Narrative.

To Sit With A Dog On A Hillside On A Glorious Afternoon Is To Be Back In Eden, Where Doing Nothing Was Not Boring - It Was Peace.

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.

She Is Sadder And Sadder, And For A Man There Is No Balm More Soothing Than The Sadness He Has Caused A Woman.

So She Stood Naked In Front Of The Young Man And At This Moment Stopped Playing The Game.

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.

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

...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.

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

The Degree Of Slowness Is Directionally Proportional To The Intensity Of Memory. The Degree Of Speed Is Directionally Proportional To The Intensity Of Forgetting.

The Reign Of Imagagology Begins Where History Ends.

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

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.

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

Unbearable Lightness Of Being

Optimism Is The Opium Of The People.

In Tereza’s Eyes, Books Were The Emblems Of A Secret Brotherhood. For She Had But A Single Weapon Against The World Of Crudity Surrounding Her: The Novels. She Had Read Any Number Of Them, From Fielding To Thomas Mann. They Not Only Offered The Possibility Of An Imaginary Escape From A Life She Found Unsatisfying; They Also Had A Meaning For Her As Physical Objects: She Loved To Walk Down The Street With A Book Under Her Arm. It Had The Same Significance For Her As An Elegant Cane From The Dandy A Century Ago. It Differentiated Her From Others.

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

Memory Does Not Make Films, It Makes Photographs.

In Irena’s Head The Alcohol Plays A Double Role: It Frees Her Fantasy, Encourages Her Boldness, Makes Her Sensual, And At The Same Time It Dims Her Memory. She Makes Love Wildly, Lasciviously, And At The Same Time The Curtain Of Oblivion Wraps Her Lewdness In An All-concealing Darkness. As If A Poet Were Writing His Greatest Poem With Ink That Instantly Disappears.

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