It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that is quite so quotable as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It seems almost impossible how Kundera manages to squeeze on to every page a thought, epigram, philosophy or phrase of penetrating beauty or insight – and yet he does. Here are some of my favourites:
“For twenty years he had lived among furniture not of his own choosing.”
“Tereza looked into the farm worker’s weather-beaten face. She found him very kind. For the first time in ages, she had found someone kind!”
“… characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.”
“… he desperately needed an imaginary eye to follow his life…”
“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions – love, antipathy, charity, or malice – and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”
If you haven’t read it, you must. I can strike it off my challenge list now!
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If you subscribe to my newsletter you will have already read a couple writing prompt ideas I recently had. Well, on Friday, all going well, I hope to post my ‘writing response’ to one of these.
