قال رامون: أجل، هذه هى الحال. يتلاقى الناس فى الحياة، يثرثرون ويتناقشون ويتشاجرون دون أن يدركوا أنهم يخاطبون بعضهم بعضًا من بعيد، كل واحد من مرصد ينتص… - Milan Kundera

Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved

During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages ts guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.

En vivant votre misère, vous pouvez être malheureuse ou heureuse. C'est dans ce choix que consiste votre liberté. Vous êtes libre de fondre votre individualité dans la marmite de la multitude avec un sentiment de défaite, ou bien avec euphorie. (...) notre seule liberté est de choisir entre l'amertume et le plaisir. L'insignifiance de tout étant notre lot, il ne faut pas la porter comme une tare, mais savoir s'en réjouir. (ch. 43)