The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Quotes
"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?"
"If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre."
"Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature."
"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body."
"What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?"
"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."
"Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite."
"Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman)."
"A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person."
"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes."
"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."
"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."
"Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble."
"She was occasionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone."
"Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music."
"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."
"Our dreams prove that to imagine—to dream about things that have not happened—is among mankind's deepest needs."
"The only reason she found the strength to leave was that she never heard that voice."
"Anyone whose goal is something higher must expect some day to suffer vertigo."
"It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
"Home again, she would pore over her German and French grammars. But she felt sad and had trouble concentrating."
"Those pauses contained all the horror that had befallen their country."
"Any man confronted with superior strength is weak, even if he has an athletic body like Dubcek's."
"What she meant was: I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
"Dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock."
"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."
"The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern."
"She was amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment."
"The only things that held them together were their defeats and the reproaches they addressed to one another."
"That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities."
"Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery."
"When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball."
"No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery."
"For Franz, a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones."
"It was there I began to divide books into day books and night books. Really, there are books meant for daytime reading and books that can be read only at night."
"People collect altars, statues, paintings, chairs, carpets, and books, and then comes a time of joyful relief and they throw it all out like so much refuse from yesterday's dinner table."
"The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about."
"The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us."
"Love is a battle, said Marie-Claude, still smiling. And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
"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?"
"A concentration camp is the complete obliteration of privacy."
"The only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious."
"What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty."
"The only value it had for them was as a blackmailing device."
"Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
"For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away."
"Her stomach was in knots, and she thought she was going to be sick."
"Waking up, she realized she was at home alone."
"The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks."
"She was grief-stricken. She understood that what she saw was a farewell."
"The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise."
"How can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience is clear! I didn't know! I was a believer!"
"Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?"
"There is always the small part that is unimaginable."
"What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person."
"Nothing she said had any bearing on the outside world; it was all directed inward, towards themselves."
"The odd asymmetry of the woman who looked like a giraffe and a stork continued to excite his memory."
"History is similar to individual lives in this respect. There is only one history of the Czechs."
"Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all."
"History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow."
"It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to send petitions to a president."
"His heart was about to break; he felt he was on the verge of a heart attack."
"He was not angry with his colleagues for having forgotten him."
"I'm sorry, said S. after a long pause, I'm in a real hurry. He held out his hand. I'll give you a buzz."
"Now that they could no longer scorn him, now that they were constrained to respect him, they gave him a wide berth."
"The situation of the declasse intellectual was no longer exceptional; it had turned into something permanent and unpleasant to confront."
"Prague has grown so ugly lately, said Tereza. I know, said Tomas."
"What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March."
"Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es muss sein!"
"Love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator."
"Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence."
"In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme."
"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch."
"The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March."
"The thought made him feel the kind of infinite love we feel for the condemned."
"His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist."
"Their struggle with mute power is the struggle of a theater company that has attacked an army."
"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under."
"The only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars, is the right to kill a deer or a cow."
"Man is not the planet's master, merely its administrator, and therefore eventually responsible for his administration."
"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power."
"Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short."
"The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development."
"All his life Karenin had waited for answers from Ter-eza, and he was letting her know (with more urgency than usual, however) that he was still ready to learn the truth from her."
"Everything that came from Tereza was the truth. Even when she gave commands like Sit! or Lie down! he took them as truths to identify with, to give his life meaning."
"She could not stand his stare; it almost frightened her. He did not look that way at Tomas, only at her."
"The look he had given her just then seemed to have tired him out."
"Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!"
"He licked her face two more times. And Tereza kept whispering, Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, you won’t feel any pain there, you’ll dream of squirrels and rabbits, you’ll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don’t be scared ..."
"He puddled his way into our lives and now he's puddling his way out."
"Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty."
"Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the know."
"The light of horror thus lost its harshness, and the world was bathed in a gentle, bluish light that actually beautified it."
"We all have a tendency to consider strength the culprit and weakness the innocent victim."
"Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has."