Again it occurred to him that Tereza was a child put in a pitch-daubed bulrush basket and sent downstream.

The dance seemed to him a declaration that her devotion, her ardent desire to satisfy his every whim, was not necessarily bound to his person, that if she hadn't met Tomas, she would have been ready to respond to the call of any other man she might have met instead.

"You've been out there risking your life for this country. How can you be so nonchalant about leaving it?"

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her; the books she took ut of the municipal library, and above all, the novels.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceable. But he, too, had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them alike, made no, absolutely no distinction between Tereza's body and the other bodies.

She told herself: Their acquaintance had been based on an error from the start. The copy of Anna Karenina under her arm amounted to false papers; it had given Tomas the wrong idea. In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. 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 rahter in their incompatibility........
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

She longed to do something that would prevent her from turning back to Tomas. She longed to destroy brutally the past seven years of her life. it was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall.

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit no transgression.

he listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the storyof his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them.

The day his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz notiched that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out her mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes fixed on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

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.

Sabina's exhibition the year before had not been particularly successful, so Marie-Claude did not set great store by Sabina's favor. Sabina, however, had every reason to set store by Marie-Claude's.

He felt like a rider galloping off into a magnificent void, a void of no wife, no duaghter, no household, the magnificent void swept clean by hercules' broom, a magnificent void he would fill with his love.

The next day, he rang Sabina's doorbell morning, noon, and night.

Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Cologne, Budapest - all were horribly scarred in the last war. But their inhabitants had build them up again and painstakingly restored the old historical sections. The people of prague had an inferiority complex with respect to these other cities.

Even if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be the same and look on in amazement at what was happening to her body.
Then what was the relationship between Tereza and her body? Had her body the right to call itself Tereza/ And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something incorporeal, intangible?

(These are questions that had been going through Tereza's head since she was a child. Indeed, the only 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.....)

One of the books caught her eye at once. it was a translation of Sophocles' Oedipus. How odd to find it here! Years ago, Tomas had given it to her, and after she had read it he went on and on about it.

For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

The image of the abandoned child had consequently become dear to him, and he often reflected on the ancient myths in which it occurred. It was apparently with this in mind that he picked up a translation of Sophocles' Oedipus.

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 not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.

The people with the first type of reaction would be happy because by inflating cowardice, he would make their actions seem commonplace and thereby give them back their lost honor. The people with the second type of reaction, who had come to consider their honor a special privilege never to be yielded, nurtured a secret love for the cowards, for without them their courage would soon erode into a trivial, monotonous grind admired by no one.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know fow to lie. The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us by our mamas and papas functions so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman during an interrogation.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records eveything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. 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.

"It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground," he said, "than to send petitions to a president."
He knew that his words were incomprehensible, but enjoyed them all the more for it.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.

he suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: people were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another.

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls?.....
The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

Life in the real Communist world was still livable. In the world of the Communist ideal made real, in that world of grinning idiots, she would have nothing to say, she would die of horror within a week.

No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

He knew perfectly well that his petition would not help the prisoners. His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist. That ,too, was playacting . But he had no other possibility. his choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting and no action at all. There are situations in which people are condemned to playact.

He kept thinking about Sabina, feeling her eyes on him. Whenever he felt her long stare, he began to doubt himself: he had never known quite what Sabina thought.

perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. 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.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthansia is not forbidden by law in their case; animal have the right to a merciful death.

(Oh, how horrible that we actually dream ahead to the death of those we love!)