Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players.
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body’s surface of its terrible, basic importance.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today’s world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
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.