"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."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"She had always secretly reproached him for not loving her enough. He own love she considered above reproach, while his seemed mere condescention."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Can proximity cause vertigo? It can. When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?"  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"'It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground,' he said, 'than to send petitions to a president.'"  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"He went off in the best of moods, trying to fix her essence in his memory, to reduce that memory to a chemical formula capable of defining her uniqueness (her millionth part dissimilarity)."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"What is unique about the 'I' hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."  - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt." - Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of quesstions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...that perverse need one has to expose one's ruins, one's ugliness, to parade one's misery, to uncover the stump of one's amputated arm and force the whole world to look at it." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatability: he was strong and she was weak... But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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. She felt attracted by their weakness as by vertigo. She felt attracted by it because she felt weak herself." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"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." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"We can never know what to want, becayse, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." - The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"...and to those of you out there on the front lines, at the polling stations, exercising your rights... and getting shit on as a result, know that your voices were heard. You bled, we all bled. We as a community cried out for some change, for a chance, for a moment to speak... Your voices, the beating heart of our community, for the first time... we drowned out this war!" - Parco Delgado in DMZ # 34 by Brian Wood.