Milan Kundera

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover—these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.

A Novel

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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?

Francine

Elina Berzina

Daria claymore

לעולם אינו יכול לדעת במה עליו לרצות, משום שהוא חי רק פעם אחת ולא ניתן לו להשוות את חייו להווה לחייו הקודמים ולא לתקן אותם בחייו הבאים

Magda 

A husband’s funeral is a wife’s true wedding.

Maria Buitrago

Here he was, doing things he didn't care a damn about, and enjoying it. Now he understood what made people (people he always pitied) happy when they took a job without feeling the compulsion of an internal "Es muss sein!'" and forgot it the moment they left for home every evening. This was the first time he had felt that blissful indifference. Whenever anything went wrong on the operating table, he would be despondent and unable to sleep. He would even lose his taste for women. The "Es muss sein!" of his profession had been like a vampire sucking his blood.

What remains of Beethoven? A frown, an improbable mane, and a somber voice intoning "Es muss sein!" What remains of Franz? An inscription reading A RETURN AFTER LONG WANDERINGS. And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. 

She was unable to fall asleep; in his arms she would fall asleep no matter how wrought up she might have been.

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

The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, teared an object as the body. thought, and marveled: that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being quotes

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