The unbearable lightness of being

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. (1999) Translated by Michael Henry Heim

pp. 8 There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

pp. 31 Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes

pp. 52 Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occureence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life

pp. 60 No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. IT is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

pp. 63 On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth

pp. 125 in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable

pp. 127 He closed his eyes as he had closed them on Sabina's in fifteen European otels and one in America

pp. 139 A question with no answr is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence

pp. 236 If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond "Es muss sein!"

pp. 238 The woman he felt he knew most intimately of all had turned out to be a woman he did not even know. And yet she was the one he had always longed for. If a personal paradise were ever to exist for him, then in that paradise he would have to lie by her side. The woman from his dream was the "Es muss sein!" of his love.

pp. 276 His funeral oration was about a true conjugal love that had withstood many tests to remain a havenof peace for the decesaed a haven to which he had returned at the end of his days

pp. 278 Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion

pp. 289 We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions -- love, anitpathy, charity, or malice -- and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals

pp. 298 Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a stright line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition

pp. 310 We all have a tnedency to consider strength the culprit and weakness the innocent victim. But now Terezza realized that in her case the opposite was true! Even her dreams, as if aware of the single weakness in a man otherwise strong, made a display of her suffering to him, thereby forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms

Es muss sein!