You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and ever… - Milan Kundera

ما أن يكون هناك شاهد علي أعمالنا حتي نتأقلم طوعا أو كرها مع النواظر التي تراقبنا, فلا يعود أي شئ مما نقوم به حقيقيا. أن نحظي بجمهور أو أن نفكر بجمهور فهذا يعني أن نعيش في الكذب.

He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then 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.

In my opinion, Jan is mistaken in thinking that the border is a line that crosses a man’s life at a specific point, that it marks a break in time, a particular second on the clock of a human life. No. I am certain, on the contrary, that the border is constantly with us, irrespective of time and our stage of life, that it is omnipresent, even though circumstances might make it more or less visible.

The woman Jan had loved most was right to say she held onto life by a spider thread. It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly, and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense.