Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Aren’t we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?
She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be.
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.
Laughing deeply is living deeply.
Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?
You think that just because it’s already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
Pain doesn’t listen to reason, it has it’s own reason, which is not reasonable.
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.
Isn’t beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.