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the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?
Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent.
In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously.
although he had never given people cause to doubt his integrity, they were ready to bet on his dishonesty rather than on his virtue.
How could someone who had so little respect for people be so dependent on what they thought of him?
How defenseless we are in the face of flattery!
And that is how he became a window washer.
Isn’t making love merely an eternal repetition of the same? Not at all.
He was not obsessed with women; he was obsessed with what in each of them is unimaginable, obsessed, in other words, with the one-millionth part that makes a woman dissimilar to others of her sex.
sexuality seems still to be a strongbox hiding the mystery of a woman’s “I.”
So it was a desire not for pleasure (the pleasure came as an extra, a bonus) but for possession of the world (slitting open the outstretched body of the world with his scalpel) that sent him in pursuit of women.
The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and nonlove.
From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.
He had no desire to uncover anything in Tereza. She had come to him uncovered.
Before he could start wondering what she would be like when they made love, he loved her.
Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Her hands had started trembling again. She had aged. She was all that mattered to him. She, born of six fortuities, she, the blossom sprung from the chief surgeon’s sciatica, she, the reverse side of all his “Es muss sein!”—she was the only thing he cared about.
Tomas could not save political prisoners, but he could make Tereza happy.
characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
Is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?
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.
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.
we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repetition?
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.
Physical love gave them pleasure but no consolation.
Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love.
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot—he could accept it all more easily than he dared admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza’s dream was something he could not endure.
It made him feel old, feel that what he longed for more than anything else was peace and quiet.
Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond “Es muss sein!”
Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Vertiginously close? Can proximity cause vertigo? It can.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image.
Without shit (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word), there would be no sexual love as we know it, accompanied by pounding heart and blinded senses.
the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions.
The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic,
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.
he had taken care of his earthly mistress, but he had neglected his unearthly love.
the glory of the Grand March was equal to the comic vanity of its marchers,
Tereza and Tomas had died under the sign of weight. She wanted to die under the sign of lightness. She would be lighter than air. As Parmenides would put it, the negative would change into the positive.
He had come to find out once and for all that neither parades nor Sabina but rather the girl with the glasses was his real life, his only real life! He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream!
In death, Franz at last belonged to his wife. He belonged to her as he had never belonged to her before. Marie-Claude took care of everything:
He was well aware that his father would not have said it in those words, but he was certain they expressed what his father actually thought. The kingdom of God means justice. Tomas had longed for a world in which justice would reign.
A farmer who no longer owns his own land and is merely a laborer tilling the soil forms no allegiance to either region or work; he has nothing to lose, nothing to fear for.
So they sought people who wished to get back at life for something, people with revenge on the brain. Then they had to focus, cultivate, and maintain those people’s aggressiveness, give them a temporary substitute to practice on. The substitute they lit upon was animals.
There’s no particular merit in being nice to one’s fellow man. She had to treat the other villagers decently, because otherwise she couldn’t live there. Even with Tomas, she was obliged to behave lovingly because she needed him. 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.
life in Paradise was not like following a straight line to the unknown; it was not an adventure. It moved in a circle among known objects. Its monotony bred happiness, not boredom.
the love that tied her to Karenin was better than the love between her and Tomas. Better, not bigger.
It is a completely selfless love: Tereza did not want anything of Karenin; she did not ever ask him to love her back. Nor had she ever asked herself the questions that plague human couples:
