The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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.

Only in sexuality does the millionth part dissimilarity become precious, because, not accessible in public, it must be conquered.

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).

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?

One day, he paid a visit to his wife. He told her he would like to remarry.

Marie-Claude shook her head.

"But a divorce won't make any difference to you! You won't lose a thing! I'll give you all the property!"

"I don't care about property," she said.

"Then what do you care about?"

"Love," she said with a smile.

"Love?" Franz asked in amazement.

"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."

"Love is a battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting." And he left.

10

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities."

She realized that she belonged among the weak, in the camp of the weak, in the country of the weak, and that she had to be faithful to them precisely because they were weak and gasped for breath in the middle of sentences.

with the rest of them?

Because he was the one who sent Tereza to join them. That was what the dream was meant to tell Tomas, what Tereza was unable to tell him herself. 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, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He had sent her back into the world she tried to escape, sent her to march naked with the other naked women.

Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life.

It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They were not born of a mother's womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying "Einma! ist keinmal." Tereza was born of the rumbling of a stomach.