The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
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 weighted down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment.
- p. 5
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with out previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
- p. 8
Tomas came to this conclusion: 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).
- p. 15
Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
But just make someone who has fallen in love to listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
- p. 40
If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.
- p. 44
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.
- p. 49
Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.
- p. 89
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they have been in life. Their monuments were meant to display how important they were. There were no fathers, brothers, sons, or grandmothers buried there, only public figures, the bearers of titles, degrees, and honors; even the postal clerk celebrated his chosen profession, his social significance – his dignity.
- p. 123
I then lost my highlighter.
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What inspiring quotations ! Keep it up , and allow me to be a frequent visitor to this “Highlights and Coffee Stains.”