RMD > RMD's Quotes

“Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Kitsch is the inability to admit that shit exists”
― Milan Kundera

“To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, 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.”
― Milan Kundera

“But deep down she said to herself, Franz maybe strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he's loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give orders.

There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal?…Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.”
― Milan Kundera

“His heart cracked, and he fell in love. He wondered if she would marry him.

“Tu sei pazzo,” she told him with a pleasant laugh.

“Why am I crazy?” he asked.

“Perché non posso sposare.”

“Why can’t you get married?”

“Because I am not a virgin,” she answered.

“What has that got to do with it?”

“Who will marry me? No one wants a girl who is not a virgin.”

“I will. I’ll marry you.”

“Ma non posso sposarti.”

“Why can’t you marry me?”

“Perché sei pazzo.”

“Why am I crazy?”

“Perché vuoi sposarmi.”

Yossarian wrinkled his forehead with quizzical amusement. “You won’t marry me because I’m crazy, and you say I’m crazy because I want to marry you? Is that right?”

“Si.”

“Tu sei pazz’!” he told her loudly.

“Perché?” she shouted back at him indignantly, her unavoidable round breasts rising and falling in a saucy huff beneath the pink chemise as she sat up in bed indignantly. “Why am I crazy?”

“Because you won’t marry me.”

“Stupido!” she shouted back at him, and smacked him loudly and flamboyantly on the chest with the back of her hand. “Non posso sposarti! Non capisci? Non posso sposarti.”

“Oh, sure, I understand. And why can’t you marry me?”

“Perché sei pazzo!”

“And why am I crazy?”

“Perché vuoi sposarmi.”

“Because I want to marry you. Carina, ti amo,” he explained, and he drew her gently back down to the pillow. “Ti amo molto.”

“Tu sei pazzo,” she murmured in reply, flattered.

“Perché?”

“Because you say you love me. How can you love a girl who is not a virgin?”

“Because I can’t marry you.”

She bolted right up again in a threatening rage. “Why can’t you marry me?” she demanded, ready to clout him again if he gave an uncomplimentary reply. “Just because I am not a virgin?”

“No, no, darling. Because you’re crazy.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Darling, we’re going to have a baby again,’ she would say to her husband.
I haven’t the time,’ Lieutenant Scheisskopf would grumble petulantly. ‘Don’t you know there’s a parade going on?”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“What would they do to me," he asked in confidential tones, "if I refused to fly them?"
We'd probably shoot you," ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen replied.
We?" Yossarian cried in surprise. "What do you mean, we? Since when are you on their side?"
If you're going to be shot, whose side do you expect me to be on?" ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen retorted”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace.”
― Milan Kundera

“When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Do you really like studying?"

Mattia nodded.

"Why?"

"It's the only thing I know how to do," he said shortly. He wanted to tell her that he liked studying because you can do it alone, because all the things you study are already dead, cold, and chewed over. He wanted to tell her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they left you time to choose, that they never hurt you and you couldn't hurt them either. But he said nothing.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“Separating them were two layers of brick, a few inches of plaster, and nine years of silence.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“There had been that time and there had been an infinite number of others, which Alice no longer remembered, because the love of those we don't love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates.”
― Paolo Giordano, The Solitude of Prime Numbers

“According to tradition, my great-grandfather married early, at 14, with a woman six years older. It was considered to be one of the duties of the wife to raise her husband.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“The cult of Mao and the cult of Lei Feng were two faces of the same coin: one was the cult of personality; the other, its essential corollary, was the cult of impersonality”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“The defenders of feeling-based marriage venerate emotions for their authenticity only because they avoid looking closely at what actually floats through most people's emotional kaleidoscopes, all the contradictory, sentimental, and hormonal forces that pull us in a hundred often crazed and inconclusive directions.

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb. A degree of repression is necessary for both the mental health of our species and the adequate functioning of a decently ordered society. We are chaotic chemical propositions. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based aorund such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious).”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the ‘right’ person rather than in knowing how to love a real — that is, a necessarily rather unright — human being.”
― Alain de Botton, How to Think More About Sex

“It was the absence of doubt—and scientific rigor—that made medicine unscientific and caused it to stagnate for so long.”
― Philip Tetlock, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

“Kahneman and other pioneers of modern psychology have revealed that our minds crave certainty and when they don't find it, they impose it.”
― Philip E. Tetlock

“Think about the love of your life and the countless events that had to happen as they did to bring the two of you together. (...) Once, it was vanishingly unlikely that you two would meet. And yet, you did. What do you make of that? Most people don' think "Wow, what luck!" Instead, they take the sheer improbability of it happening, and the fact it happened, as proof it was meant to happen.”
― Philip E. Tetlock

“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.”
― André Gide