The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (updated)

• "Culture is perishing in overproduction in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity."
• "A sea of words with no weight, and no resemblance to life."
• "It's good that she's gone and that I'll never see her again, though, it's not Tereza I need to be free of - it's that sickness, compassion, which I thought I was immune to until she infected me with it."
• "For 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."
• "Muss es sein? Must it be? Es muss sein! It must be!"
• "The weighty resolution is at one with the voice of Fate; necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value."
• "But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
• "Because love means renouncing strength…" -Franz
• "Love is a battle. And I plan to go on fighting. To the end." - Marie-Claude
• "Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer 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."
• "I don't want to be jealous. I suppose I'm just not strong enough to stand up to it. Help me, please!"
• "When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."
• "A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it."
• "On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth showing through…"
• "Her paintings are a struggle for happiness."
• "He wanted the kingdom of heaven on Earth."
• "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."