“She loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It differentiated her from the others”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Quotes from book
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Original title
Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí
(Czech, 1984)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history. Although written in 1982, the novel was not published until two years later, in a French translation . The original Czech text was published the following year.
“In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.”
Pg 5
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us… Only chance can speak to us.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, pg 48
Variant: He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
pg 10
Variant: Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 50
“The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.”
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), as quoted in Milan Kundera (2003) by Harold Bloom, [//books.google.it/books?id=SXDojRJFMPIC&pg=PA91 p. 91]
Context: True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
