To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer’s faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
If I hadn’t met you, I’d certainly have fallen in love with him.
But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, “it,” he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.
The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
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.