Selected Quotes from "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," by Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is probably one of the best pieces of literature that I have read in a very long time. Also, I feel like I have finally read a book that has severely altered my view on life, love, and existence. I feel the way that I think that I should have been feeling after reading books like Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, etc--books that are notorious for their eye-openings, but still managed to fall disappointingly flat. 

This book is a bit of a conundrum when it comes to definition. In the end I would label it as a philosophy book. Kundera's musings are structured upon the lives of four (five?) main characters: Tomas, Tereza, Sabina, Franz, and to a certain degree, a dog, Karenin. However, it would be largely incorrect to call this book a novel or a collection of stories. Milan Kundera actually has a style of presenting and then commentating, and then presenting again and then commentating again. And so yes the book has plot and development, but I would say that this is merely a vessel in which he presents his ideas on existence.

Below are some of the quotes that I found to be the most thoughtful, the most beautiful, the most revelatory, and the most relatable. Keep in mind that it will be difficult to gain the full force of the book's meaning from a few slices of text. I understand that. As amazing as this book is, it is nothing in simple fragments--and to fully appreciate the fragments, one must know the whole:

p.4, "In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."

p.4-5, "The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become... Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes a 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."

p.10, "Metaphors are not be trifled with."

p.30, "...There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. "

p.46, "Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee ground at the bottom of a cup."

p.49, "Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in the times of greatest distress."

p.85, "Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume the correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it."

p.87, "Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. What what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown."

p.90, "Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death."

p.109, "For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowance for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."

p.135, "These are questions that had been going through Tereza's head since she was a child. Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve of questions are truly serious. They are the questions that have no answers. A question with no answers is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence."

p.216, "Another way of formulating the questions is, It is better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death?"

p.244, "How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see it in their souls?...The senator had only one argument in his favor: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitude can share... Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! The second tear is what makes kitsch kitsch."

p.245, "Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more of less to escape kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movements corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say "totalitarian", what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree 'Be fruitful and multiply."

p.247, "Kitsch is a folding screen set up to curtain off death."

p.288, "Comparing Adam to Karenin leads me to the thought that in Paradise man was not yet man. Or, to be more precise, man had not yet been cast out on man's path. Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not be man."

p.290, "Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition."

p.305, "She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was the form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness"