The Unbearable Lightness of Being

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.

The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

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

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?

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

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about 89 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.

overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities

Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.

Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about.

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which 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.

If rejection and privilege are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if the Son of God can undergo judgment for shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearably light.

the line separating those who doubt being as it is granted to man (no matter how or by whom) from those who accept it without reservation

No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia.

Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions."