In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood.
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks.
Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries.
In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.
How goodness heightens beauty!
The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood’s lost steps.
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor.
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.
This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared.
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
I have no mission. No one has.