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Jiří Kvita |
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Jiří Kvita |
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pg. 19: Compassion
pg. 29
His love for Tereza was beautiful, but also tiring: he had constantly had to
hide things from her, sham, dissemble, make amends, buck her up, calm her down,
give her evidence of his feelings, play the defendant to her jealousy, her
suffering, and her dreams, feel guilty, make excuses and apologies. Now what was
tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.
pg. 33
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various
scientific hypotheses. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot
conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
pg. 58
pg. 121
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to
use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to
us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it,
win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a
man becouse she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to
take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of
lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness
of being.
pg. 139
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.
pg.206
I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.
Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word
into our poetic memory.
pg. 219
Human life occurs only once, and the raeson we cannot determine which of our
decisions are good and which are bad is that in a given situation we can make
only one decision; we are not granted a second, third or fourth life in which to
compare various decisions.
...
On Saturday and Sunday, he felt the sweet lightness of being rise up to him out
of the depths of the future. On Monday, he was hit by a weight the likes of
which he had never known. The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing
compare with it. For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's
own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain
intesified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
pg. 220
Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might might as well not have
happened at all. The history of Czechs will not be repeated, nor will be the
history of Europe. The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches
from the pen of mankind's fateful inexperience. History is as light as
individual humal life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling
into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
pg. 234
Attaching love to sex is one of the most bizarre ideas the Creator ever had.
pg. 243
pg. 266
pg. 295
...And therein lies the the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a
circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy:
happiness is the longing for repetition.
pg. 30: This was the most difficult thing to explain: that she needed to know
how they were, even though at the same time she had no desire whatever to see
them or to be with them.
pg. 35: "Just imagine living in a world without mirrors. You'd dream about
your face and imagine it is an outer reflection of what is inside you. And then,
when you reach forty, someone put a mirror before you for the first time in your
life. Imagine your fright! You'd see a face of a stranger. And you'd know quite
clearly what you are unable to grasp: your face is not you."
pg. 42: The marital bed: the altar of marriage; and when one says altar, one
implies sacrifice...Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to
move> the marital bed.
pg. 78: Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
pg. 136: The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing each other.