To put it another way, every love relationship is based on unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. One the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!
In those first weeks it was decided between Karel and Marketa that Karel would be unfaithful and Marketa would submit, but that Marketa would have the privilege of being the better one in the couple and Karel would always feel guilty. No one knew better than Marketa how depressing it was to be better. The only reason she was better was for want of anything better.
— The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, p. 36-37
“Something just occurred to me,” Michelle said suddenly. “What?” asked Gabrielle, curious. “Madame Raphael even hinted at it,” said Michele to pique Gabrielle’s curiousity even further. “Well, what is it?” asked Gabrielle impatiently. “The author meant to create a comic effect!”
Gabrielle was so taken by her friend’s idea, so involved in what was going on in her head, that without realizing it she began walking more and more slowly. The two girls had nearly come to a halt.
“You mean the symbol of the rhinoceros is meant to create a comic effect?” she asked. “Yes,” answered Michelle, smiling the proud smile of revelation.
— The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, p. 56
“… Idolizers or poets have always been prime booty for hysterics. Hysterics know that idolizers will never slap them. Idolizers are helpless when faced with a woman because they’ve never left their mothers’ shadows. They see an envoy from their mothers in every woman and immediately give in. Their mothers’ skirts hang over them like the firmament.”
— The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, p. 134
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 8
Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 14-15
All languages that derive from Latin form the word compassion' by combining the prefix meaning with’ (com-) and the root
meaning suffereing' (Late Latin, <em>passio</em>). In other languages--Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance--this word is translated by a noun fromed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means feeling’ (Czech, sou-cit; Polish,
wspól-czucie; German, Mit-gefühl;
Swedish, med-känsla).
In languages that derive from Latin, compassion' means: we cannot look on cooly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, pity’
(French, pitié; Italian, pietà; etc.),
connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. `To take pity
on a woman’ means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to
her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word `compassion’ generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 19
The reason she finally chose the ninth [suitor] was not so much that he was the most manly of all as that when she whispered `Be careful, very careful’ to him during their lovemaking he was purposely careless, and she had to marry him after failing to find a doctor willing to perform an abortion. And so Tereza was born. Numerous relatives gathered from all corners of the country to lean over the pram and talk baby talk. Tereza’s mother talked no baby talk. She did not talk at all. She thought about the eight other suitors, all of whom seemed better than the ninth.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 42
Anyone whose goal is `something higher’ must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than 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.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 58
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 86-87
(These are questions that had been going through Tereza’s head since she was a child. Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier tha 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.)
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 137
What is flirtation? One might say that it is behaviour leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 139
Tereza felt her courage slipping away. Her weakness drove her to despair, but she could do nothing to couteract it. `But it wasn’t my choice,’ she said.
He immediately lowered the barrel of his rifle and said in a gentle voice, `If it wasn’t your choice, we can’t do it. We haven’t the right.’
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 147
The excitement she felt was all the greater because she was excited against her will. In other words, her soul did condone the proceedings, albeit covertly. But she also knew that if the feeling of excitement was to continue, her soul’s approval would have to keep mute. The moment it said its yes aloud, the moment it tried to take an active part in the love scene, the excitement would subside. For what made the sould so excited was that the body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the soul was looking on.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 151-152
But, he said to himself, whether they knew or didn’t know is not the main issue; the main issue is whether a man is innocent because he didn’t know. Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?
Let us concede that a Czech public prosecutor in the early fifties who called for the death of an innocent man was deceived by the Russian secret police and the government of his own country. But now that we all know the accusations to have been absurd and the executed to have been innocent, how can that selfsame public prosecutor defend his purity of heart by beating himself on the chest and proclaiming, My conscience is clear! I didn’t know! I was a believer! Isn’t his `I didn’t know! I was a believer!’ at the very root of his irreparable guilt?
It was in this connection that Tomas recalled the tale of Oedipus: Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfortunes he had wrought by `not knowing’, he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 172-173
Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all actors the world over are similar–in Paris, Prague, or the back of beyond. An actor is someone who in early childhood consents to exhibit himself for the rest of his life to an anonymous public. Without that basic consent, which has nothing to do with talent, which goes deeper than talent, no one can become an actor. Similarly, a doctor is someone who consents to spend his life involved with human bodies and all that they entail. That basic consent (and not talent or skill) enables him to enter the dissecting room during the first year of medical school and persevere for the requisite number of years.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 189
One more, and with a nostalgia akin to love, Tomas thought of the tall, stooped editor. That man acted as though history were a finished picture rather than a sketch. He acted as though everything he did were to be repreated endlessly, to return eternally, without the slightest doubt about his actions. He was convinced he was right, and for him that was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue. Yes, that man lived in a history different from Tomas’s: a history that was not (or did not realize it was) a sketch.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 220-221
He thought: In the clockwork of the head, two cogwheels turn opposite each other. On the one, images; on the other, the body’s reactions. The cog carrying the image of a naked woman meshes with the corresponding erection-command cog. But whe, for one reason or another, the wheels go out of phase and the excitement cog meshes with a cog bearing the image of a swallow in flight, the penis rises at the sight of a swallow.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 233
If the cogwheel in Tomas’s head goes out of phase and he is excited by seeing a swallow, it has absolutely no effect on his love for Tereza.
If excite is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us along and enables us to flee the Creator.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 234
Tomas thought: Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.
He also thought: One way of saving love from the stupidity of sex would be to set the clockwork in our head in such a was as to excite us at the sight of a swallow.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 234
In Part Three of this novel I told the tale of Sabina standing half-naked with a bowler hat on her head and the fully dressed Tomas at her side. There is something I failed to mention at the time.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 245
The fact that until recently the word `shit’ appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The object to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. Either/or: either shit is acceptable (in which case don’t lock yourself in the bathroom!) or we are created in an unacceptable manner.
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 245-246
`Kitsch’ is a German word born in the middle of the sentimental nineteenth century, and from German it entered all Western languages. Repeated use, however, has obliterated its original metaphysical meaning: kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 246
And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruellest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict that could occur between two Russians was a lover’s misunderstanding: he thought that she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each other’s arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 250
The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 282
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 towards those who are at its mercy: animals.
— The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 285-286
In 1968 and 1969, The Joke was translated into all the Western languages. But what surprises! In France, the translator rewrote the novel by ornamenting my style. In England, the publisher cut out all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, changed the order of the parts, recomposed the novel. Another country: I meet my translator, a man who knows not a word of Czech. “Then how did you translate it?” “With my heart.” And he pulls a photo of me from his wallet. He was so congenial that I almost believed it was actually possible to translate by some telepathy of the heart. Of course, it turns out to be much simpler: he had worked from the French rewrite, as had the translator in Argentina. Another country: the translation was done from the Czech. I open the book and happen on Helena’s monologue. The long sentences that in my original go on for a whole paragraph at a time are broken up into a multitude of short ones… The shock of The Joke’s translation scarred me forever. All the more because for me, since practically speaking I no longer have the Czech audience, translations are everything. I therefore decided, a few years ago, to put some order into the foreign editions of my books. This involved a certain amount of conflict and fatigue: reading, checking, correcting my novels, old and new, in the three of four foreign languages I can read, completely took over a whole period of my life…
— From an introduction to The Joke