Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Unbearable Lightness of Being > Status Update

"They had sold their car, their television set and their radio to buy a tiny cottage and garden..." Communist economics explained.

"A husband's funeral is a wife's true wedding!" Makes you wonder if Czech widows also put their names on their husband's gravestones.

"Behind his words there was more than joy at seeing children run and grass grow; there was a deep understanding of the plight of a refugee from a Communist country where, the senator was convinced, no grass grew or children ran."

"History is as light as an individual human life, unbearably light, as light as a feather..." Forrest Gump?

"An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor." What do teachers consent to?

"Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made by not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise."

I used to say literature is art not life because nobody goes to the toilet in literature: cancel that.

"Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies." Facebook, etc. ?

"Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.