Quotes from book
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan KunderaOriginal 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.

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Three: Words Misunderstood

“But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: 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 book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Three: Words Misunderstood, Ch. 10

“Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 33
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Three: Words Misunderstood

“We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 28
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

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

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 208
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 20
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 56
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Six: The Grand March, Ch. 29

“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 209
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Pg 50
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“It was the call of all those fortuities… which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 51
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“Love is our freedom.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 236
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

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