Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden. - Milan Kundera

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

She began to teeter as she walked, fell almost daily, bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects. She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. 'Pick me up,' is the message of a person who keeps falling.

We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. Even the most voluminous archives cannot help.