the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. the absolute of a burden causes man to be lig… - Milan Kundera

The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

انظر! نصف هؤلاء الذين تراهم على الأقل قبيحون! أن يكون المرء قبيحًا! هل هذا أيضًا جزء من حقوق الإنسان؟ وهل تعرف أنه يحمل قبحه طيلة حياته؟ دون أية راحة؟ جنسك أيضًا، أنت لم تختره. ولم تختر لون عينيك ولا القرن الذى تحيا فيه. ولا بلدك. ولا أمك. لا أى شئ مهم. الحقوق التى يمكن أن يحصل عليها إنسان لا تتعلق إلا بتفاهات وليس ثمة سبب للصراع حولها أو كتابة إعلانات شهيرة عنها.

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.