Milan Kundera was born on April 1929 in what used to be Czechoslovakia, and without a doubt he is one of the most read and beloved writers of the twentieth century. For many, his crown jewel is The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
A curious fact that makes this enigmatic and renowned figure more approachable to us mortals is that he had to work at bars playing jazz music to earn a living, for in 1967 the communist party of Czechoslovakia had banned his plays. As he caressed the black and white keys, he never would have imagined that his career would skyrocket thanks to a book that would come to light in 1984. Another interesting curio is that, while the book was written in Czech, it wasn’t edited in its home country until 2006. This is due to the fact that Kundera was exiled in France for 30 years, and it was there that his career finally flourished. In 1988, the filmmaker Philip Kaufman took to the big screen Kundera’s masterpiece.
There are books we hold close to our chest because we feel as if each word that was typed out was written especially for us. Everyone has had their heart broken and have allowed their emotions to run wild. Milan Kundera speaks to the broken person we once were, so here are 20 quotes from The Unbearable Lightness of Being so you can fall apart and put yourself back together.
1. “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
2. “Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.”
3. “Does he love me? Does he love anyone more than me? Does he love me more than I love him? Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.”
4. “(…)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 allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”
5. “It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.”
6. “In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak.”
7. “love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory”
8. “Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
9. “He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
10. “Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the “Es muss sein!” of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.”
11. “The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in 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 man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
12. “A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
13. “She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don’t let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, ‘You don’t know how happy I am to be with you.’ That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.”
14. “Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
15. “The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”
16. “’Why don’t you ever use your strength on me?’ she said. ‘Because love means renouncing strength,’ said Franz softly.”
17. “’Love is a battle,’ said Marie-Claude, still smiling. ‘And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.’
‘Love is a battle?’ said Franz. ‘Well, I don’t feel at all like fighting.’ And he left.”
18. “We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.”
19. “Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”
20. “Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.”