From the top of the staircase she sees the London train, modern and elegant, and she tells herself again: Whether it's good luck or bad to be born on… - Milan Kundera

Whether it's good luck or bad to be born onto this earth, the best way to spend a life here is to let yourself be carried along, as I am at this moment, by a cheerful, noisy crowd moving forward.

Can't you come up with something different? And therein lies the whole of mans plight.Human time does not turn in a circle;it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy:happiness is the longing for repetition.

He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.