Saturday, May 2, 2015

Unbearable Lightness of Being Quotes

Here are some quotes I found for The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Quotes

  • “In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make” (5)
  • “If the eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness” (5)
  • “If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all”- Einmal ist keinmal (8)
  • “That is why the world ‘compassion’ generally inspire suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love” (20) 
  • “For nothing is 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 imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes” (31) 
  • Es muss sein” means “It must be!” (33)
  • “We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our live is what must be, that without it in our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the ‘Es muss sein!’ to our own great love” (35) 
  • “It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived. They weren't born of a mother’s womb; they were born of a stimulating phrase or two or from a basic situation. Tomas was born of the saying ‘Einmal ist keinmal’. Tereza was born from the rumbling of a stomach" (39)
  • “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 for us” (48)
  • “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.” (112)
  • “The criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise” (176)
  • “Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?” (177)
  • “”Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love beings at the point when a woman enters her first word in her poetic memory” (209)
  • “The main thing is to make the point that there still are a handful of people in this country who are not afraid. And to show who stands where. Separate the wheat from the chaff” (215)
  • “Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond ‘Es muss sein!’” (236)
  • “Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative sense of the word’ Kitsch excludes everything from tits purview which is essentially unacceptable in human sense” 

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I think these are all really good and important quotes, Bonnie. I think one theme that is general and may appear on the exam is the relationship between fate and chance that we have discussed heavily in class. It would be good to study how they are heavily intertwined and how they are independent from one another. It would be good to study different characters and heir perspectives on fate and chance. In my opinion, I think in this novel all of the different chances ultimately come to determine fate.