The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

by Milan Kundera

Franz shook his head. ‘When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls’ Day. 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.’

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.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia.