Milan Kundera The Joke Quotes

I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.

Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.

Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting. No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

People who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all.

But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.

I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life.

Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality.

It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape. After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.

A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions.

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules.

لقد تأصل لدي عدم التصديق ، إلى حد أنه حين يفضي إليّ امرؤ بما يحب أو لا يحب ، لم أكن أحمل كل هذا على محمل الجد أو لم أكن ، بصورة أكثر دقة ، أرى فيه سوى مجرد شهادة على الصورة التي يريد إعطاءها عن نفسه !.

What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand

كل ما يهم هو أن يكون المرء كما هو ، ألّا يحمر خجلاً من كونه يريد ما يريد ، يرغب فيما يرغب فيه . الناس عبيد المعايير . قال أحدهم يوماً ، إنه ينبغي للمرء أن يكون مثل هذا أو ذاك وعند ذلك اجتهدوا في أن يكونوه ، ولن يعرفوا قط ما كانوا ولا ماهم عليه ، وبالتالي فهم ليسوا أحداً . يجب على المرء ، فوق كل شىء أن يجرؤ ليكون هو نفسه.

كنت فريسة الخوف، الخوف من هذا الافق الباعث على الرجاء. وكنت أحس بروحي تنطوي على ذاتها ، أحسها تتقهقر، وكنت مرعوبا من فكرة أنه لم يبق لها أمام هذا الحصار سوى الهرب .

And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable.

All the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. Drink it to the dregs. No cheating allowed. No making believe it's not there. Modern man cheats. He tries to get around all the milestones on the road from birth to death.

The churches failed to realize that the working-class movement was the movement of the humiliated and oppressed supplicating for justice. They did not choose to work with and for them to create the kingdom of God on earth. By siding with the oppressors, they deprived the working-class movement of God. And now they reproach it for being godless. The Pharisees!

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, "that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter." There is no doubt: this laughter goes "far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule." The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing at anything concrete, their laughter has no object; it is an expression of being rejoicing at being... and in this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the immediate present of the world, and needs no other knowledge.

and I felt happy inside these songs (...) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and solu (...), where they dance in joy...

من الصعب العيش مع أشخاص مستعدين لإرسالك إلى المنفى او الموت ، من الصعب أن تصنع منهم أصدقاء حميمين ، كما من الصعب أن تحبهم !.

لا شىء يُقارب بين الناس بهذه السرعة مثل اتفاق حزين ، كئيب . هذا الجو من التواطؤ المسالم الذي ينيّم أي نوع من المخاوف أو المكابح وتفهمه النفوس المُهذبة كالنفوس العامية ؛ يمثل أسهل نمط للتقارب !.

Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.

It was time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living pure time—pure, vacant time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight.

And I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but at least was asbolutely serious about marrying her one day

اعتقادات مردم مفهومي ندارند، آنهايي كه از بالاي پشت بامها از شادي فرياد مي زنند، معمولا از همه غمگين ترند

Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of paintings and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

Who was the real me? I can only repeat: I was a man of many faces. At meetings I was earnest, enthusiastic, and committed; among friends, unconstrained and given to teasing; with Marketa, cynical and fitfully witty; and alone (and thinking of Marketa), unsure of myself and as agitated as a schoolboy. Was the last face the real one? No. They were all real: I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn’t know who I was or wanted to be. (I was frightened by the differences between one face and the next; none of them seemed to fit me properly, and I groped my way clumsily among them.)

I'd never recited poetry to anyone before; I've never done it since. I have a highly sensitive, built-in fuse mechanism that keeps me from opening up too far, from revealing my feelings, and reciting poetry makes me feel as though I'm talking about my feelings and standing on one leg at the same time.

The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.

No matter what people say, life is marvelous, if you want to know who gets mu goats, it's those killjoy pessimists, even if I have plenty to complain about, you don't hear a peep out of me, what for. I ask you, what for, when life can bring me a day like today; oh, how marvelous it all is: a strange town, and me here with you...

We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power...All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.

You must admit: it's not easy to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it's not easy to become intimate with them, its not easy to love them.

There was nothing to be done. From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood tha Lucie cared for it; perhaps her tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence, made her think of flowers as a form of speech; not in the sense of heavy-handed conventional flower symbolism, but in a sense still more archaic, more nebulous, more instinctive, prelinguistic; perhaps, having always been sparing of words, she longed for that mute stage of evolution when there were no words and people communicated by simple gestures

I am obedient. I can never say no to those weaker than myself. And because I am six feet two and can lift a two-hundred-pound sack with one hand, in all my life I have yet to find anyone I can resist.

Vlasta me reprocha que soy un soñador. Parece que no veo las cosas tal como son. No, veo las cosas tal como son, pero además de las cosas visibles veo también las invisibles. Las ideas inventadas no son algo inútil. Son precisamente ellas las que hacen de nuestras casas hogares

كل الوجوه كانت حقيقية لم يكن لي ، على غرار المنافقين وجه حقيقي وأخرى زائفة ،كان لدي عدة وجوه لأني كنت فتياً ولم أكن أنا نفسي ، أعرف من أكون ومن أريد أن أكونه لايمنع ذلك من أن عدم التناسب الموجود بين كل هذه الوجوه كان يخلق لدي الوجل ،لم أكن أطابق أياً منها تماماً، وكنت أتحرك وراءها ببلادة بشكل أعمى.

Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test: every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues (willingly or not, out of conviction or fear) raised theirs. You must admit: it's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death, it's hard to become intimate with them, it's hard to love them.

Sometimes (more in sport than from real concern) I defended myself against the charge of individualism and demanded from the others proof that I was an individualist. For want of concrete evidence they would say: “ It´s the way you behave.” “How do I behave?” “You have a strange kind of smile”. “And If I do? That´s how I express my joy.” “No, your smile is though you were thinking to yourself.

الشباب مخيف : إنه مسرح يتحرك فيه أطفال على عكازات عالية وبأكثر الألبسة تنوعاً ، ويدلون بصيغ متعلمة يفهمونها نصف فهم ، و لكنهم يتمسكون بها بتعصب . التاريخ مخيف أيضاً ، وهو الذي غالباً ما يستخدم ميدان لعب لغير الناضجين ، ميدان لعب لنيرون فتى ، لبونابرت فتى ، لحشود الأطفال المكهربة التي تتحول عواطفها المقلدة وأدوارها المبسطة إلى حقيقة واقعية كارثياً.

I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the non-resemblance; and that the non-resemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.

I looked at her; I saw a slipshod permanet crumpling her hair into a shapeless mass of curls; I saw a brown overcoat, pitifully threadbare and a bit too shot; I saw a face both unobtrusively attractive and attractively unobtrusive; I sensed in this young woman tranquillity, simplicity and modesty, and I felt that these were qualities I needed; moreover, it seemed to me that we were very much akin: all I had to do was to go up and start talking to her and she would smile as if a long-lost brother had suddenly appeared before her.

Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.

A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deception.

Nothing brings people together more quickly than shared melancholy.

Un valor vulnerado y una ilusión desenmascarada suelen tener el cuerpo igual de mortificado, se parecen, y no hay nada más fácil que confundirlos.

If God's masons built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to destroy them. But instead of walls all I see is backdrops, sets. And sets are made to be destroyed.

They love their bodies. We neglected ours. They love to travel. We stayed put. They love adventure. We spent all our time at meetings. They love jazz. We were satisfied with pale imitations of folk music. They're interested in themselves. We wanted to save the world and with our messianic vision nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their egotism will be the ones to save it.

The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy.

You certainly remember this scene from dozens of films: a boy and a girl are running hand in hand in a beautiful spring (or summer) landscape. Running, running, running and laughing. By laughing the two runners are proclaiming to the whole world, to audiences in all the movie theaters: "We're happy, we're glad to be in the world, we're in agreement with being!" It's a silly scene, a cliche, but it expresses a basic human attitude: serious laughter, laughter "beyond joking." All churches, all underwear manufacturers, all generals, all political parties, are in agreement about that kind of laughter, and all of them rush to put the image of the two laughing runners on the billboards advertising their religion, their products, their ideology, their nation, their sex, their dishwashing powder.

By stablishing an acquaintance with Lucie, I too had set my destiny in motion; but I did not lose sight of it. Though we didn't meet very often, at least our mettings were fairly regular, and I knew she was capable of waiting several weeks and then greeting me as if we'd seen each other the day before

Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

Sí, de repente lo ví así: la mayoría de la gente se engaña mediante una doble creencia errónea: cree en el eterno recuerdo (de la gente, de las cosas, de los actos, de las naciones) y en la posibilidad de reparación (de los actos, de los errores, de los pecados, de las injusticias.Ambas creencias son falsas. La realidad es precisamente al contrario: todo será olvidado y nada será reparado. El papel de la reparación (de la venganza y el perdón) lo lleva a cabo el olvido. Nadie reparará las injusticias que se cometieron, pero todas las injusticias serán olvidadas”.

Con ello no quiero decir que haya dejado de amarla, que la haya olvidado, que su recuero haya empalidecido; al contrario; permanece dentro de mí constantemente como una callada nostalgia; la anhelo como se anhela algo que se ha perdido definitivamente.

It was only an idea, a sudden flash, but it kept coming back to me, and I couldn't help thinking, why am I alive, what good is there in going on, but it's not true really, I didn't think anything of the sort, I was hardly thinking at all, I just imagined myself no longer alive and suddenly I felt such bliss, such strange bliss that I wanted to laugh and maybe really did begin to laugh.

The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models— those that are in fashion, that suit, that please—and enact them.

What those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous of years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or |what was equally sinful| giving way individualistically to inner sorrows.

When the Comrades classified my conduct and my smile as intellectual (another notorious pejorative of the times), I actually came to believe them because I couldn´t imagine (I wasn´t bold enough to imagine it) that anyone else might be wrong, that the Revolution itself, the spirit of the times, might be wrong and I, an individual, might be right. I began to keep tabs on my smiles, and soon I felt a tiny crack opening up between the person I had been and the person I should be (according to the spirit of the times) and tried to be.

How would I explain to him that I couldn’t make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?

It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their love its shape.

Pa što ako nam se ne sviđa podignuti prst, dovoljno je da mu okrenemo leđa. Tako sam i učinio i krenuo iz dvorišta ponovno na ulicu.

No hay nada que una más rápido a la gente (aunque solo sea en apariencia e ilusoriamente) que una comprensión mutua triste y melancólica.

El amor tiende a hacer una leyenda de sí mismo y a mitificar retrospectivamente sus comienzos.

Porque vivir en un mundo donde no se le perdona nada a nadie, donde nadie puede redimirse, es lo mismo que vivir en el infierno.

Ningún movimiento que se plantee transformar el mundo soporta la burla ni el desprecio.

A value debased and an illusion unmasked have the same pitiful shell.

When music plays, we hear the melody, forgetting that it is only one of the modes of time; when the orchestra falls silent, we hear time; time itself.

We wanted to destroy the world. With our messianism we nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their selfishness will save it.

No entiendo por qué me felicitáis todos, ¡Si hubiera una guerra yo dispararía contra vosotros!

Alas, I found no guarantee I would have acted any better; but how has that affected my relationship with others? The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.

Sería tan sencillo encontrar la calma en el mundo de la imaginación. Pero yo siempre he tratado de vivir en los dos mundos al mismo tiempo y no abandonar uno de ellos por culpa del otro.

in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual; curiously, this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged, forever obscured by lyrical dreams of the transparent glass house, it is rarely understood to be the value one must defend beyond all others. Thus only gradually did people realize (though their rage was all the greater) that the real scandal was not Prochazka's daring talk but the rape of his life; they realized (as if by electric shock) that private and public are two essentially different worlds and that respect for that difference is the indispensable condition, the sine qua non, for a man to live free; that the curtain separating these two worlds is not to be tampered with, and that curtain-rippers are criminals.

Sve je u tome da čovjek bude onakav kakav jeste, da se ne stidi željeti ono što želi, čeznuti za onim za čim čezne. Ljudi su obično robovi propisa. Neko im je rekao da treba da budu takvi i takvi, i oni nastoje da budu takvi i obično do smrti ne saznaju ko su i šta su bili. Na taj način postaju niko i ništa, djeluju podvojeno, nejasno, zbunjeno. Čovjek prije svega mora imati hrabrosti da bude ono što jeste.

It would be so simple to find peace in the world of fantasy. But I've always tried to live in the two worlds at the same time without giving up one for the other. I must not give up the real world even though I am losing everything in it. Perhaps it will be enough in the end if I manage one thing. One last thing: To hand over my life as a clear message to the one person able to understand it and carry it on.

Би било толку едноставно да се најде мир во светот на илузии. Ама, секогаш се трудев да живеам во двата света истовремено и да не го напуштам едниот поради другиот. Не смеам да го напуштам реалниот свет, иако во него губам се’. На крајот можеби ќе биде доволно ако ми успее едно нешто. Последното нешто: Да му го предадам мојот живот како јасно и разбирливо послание на единствениот човек што ќе го сфати и понесе понатаму.

Nothing brings people together more quickly (though often spuriously and deceitfully) than shared melancholy; this atmosphere of quiet understanding, which puts all manner of fears and inhibitions to sleep and is easily comprehended by the refined and vulgar, the erudite and unlettered, is the most simple route to rapport, yet extremely rare: for one has to lay aside cultivated restraints, cultivated gestures and facial expressions, and be simple

Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book...

Počeo sam shvaćati da nema te sile koja bi mogla izmijeniti sliku moje ličnosti, koja je pohranjena negdje gdje se s najvišeg mjesta odlučuje o ljudskim sudbinama; shvatio sam da je ta slika (ma koliko bila neslična meni) mnogo stvarnija od mene samoga; da nije ona kriva što mi nije slična , nego da sam ja kriv što nisam sličan njoj; da je ta nesličnost moj križ koji ne mogu stresti ni na koga, koji moram sam nositi. Ipak nisam htio kapitulirati. Htio sam nositi svoju nesličnost: biti i dalje ono za što je odlučeno da nisam.

Me reprocha que soy un soñador. Parece que no veo las cosas tal como son. No, veo las cosas tal como son, pero además de las cosas visibles veo también las invisibles. Las ideas inventadas no son algo inútil. Son precisamente ellas las que hacen de nuestras casas hogares.

You see, Klara," I said, "you think that a lie is a lie, and it would seem that you're right. But you aren't. I can invent anything, make a fool of someone, carry out hoaxes and practical jokes- and I don't feel like a liar and I don't have a bad conscience. These lies, if you want to call them that, represent me as I really am. With such lies I'm not simulating anything, with such lies I'm in fact speaking the truth. But there are things I can't lie about. There are things I've penetrated, whose meaning I've grasped, that I love and take seriously. I can't joke about these things. If I did, I'd humiliate myself.

I know you're quiet a workman on God's eternal construction site and don't like hearing about demolition, but what can I do? Myself, I'm not one of God's bricklayers. Besides, if God's bricklayers built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to demolish them. But instead of walls all I see is stage sets. And stage sets are made to be demolished.

Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

Stjecanje kontrole nad ženskim razmišljanjem ima, naime, svoja strogo određena pravila; onaj tko odluči ženu nagovarati, uvjeravati je razumnim argumentima i slično teško da će nešto postići. Kudikamo je pametnije odrediti osnovnu autostilizaciju žene (osnovne principe kojima se rukovodi, ideale, uvjerenja) i nastojati da se (pomoću sofizma, alogične demagogije itd.) željena odluka žene dovede u sklad s tom autostilizacijom.

She spoke about it with such emphasis (somewhat affected) that I could see at once that I was hearing the manifesto of her generation. Every generation has its own set of passions, loves, and interests, which it professes with a certain tenacity, to differentiate it from older generations and to confirm itself in its uniqueness. Submitting to a generation mentality (to this pride of the herd) has always repelled me. After Miss Broz had developed her provocative argument (I've now heard it at least fifty times from people her age) that all mankind is divided into those who give hitchhikers lifts (human people who love adventure) and those who don't (inhuman people who fear life), I jokingly called her a "dogmatist of the hitch." She answered sharply that she was neither dogmatist nor revisionist nor sectarian nor deviationist, that those were all words of ours, that we had invented them, that they belonged to us, and that they were completely alien to them.

Ya hoy la historia no es más que la estrecha hebra de lo recordado sobre el océano de lo olvidado, pero el tiempo sigue su marcha y llegará la época en que los años tengan muchas cifras, y la memoria del individuo, que habrá permanecido igual en su extensión, no será capaz de abarcarlos; por eso irán desapareciendo de ella siglos y milenios enteros, siglos de cuadros y música, siglos de descubrimientos, batallas, libros, y eso será grave, porque el hombre perderá la conciencia de sí mismo y su historia, inconceptuable,incontenible, se encogerá en unas cuantas abreviaturas carentes de sentido

I had all kinds of answers ready for the commissions that called me in and asked me what had made me become a Communist, but what had attracted me to the movement more than anything, dazzled me, was the feeling (real or apparent) of standing near the wheel of history. For in those days we actually did decide the fate of men and events, especially at the universities; in those early years there were very few Communists on the faculty, and the Communists in the student body ran the universities almost single-handed, making decisions on academic staffing, teaching reform, and the curriculum. The intoxication we experienced is commonly known as the intoxication of power, but (with a bit of good will) I could choose less severe words: we were bewitched by history; we were drunk with the thought of jumping on its back and feeling it beneath us; admittedly, in most cases the result was an ugly lust for power, but (as all human affairs are ambiguous) there was still (and especially, perhaps, in us, the young), an altogether idealistic illusion that we were inaugurating a human era in which man (all men) would be neither outside history, nor under the heel of history, but would create and direct it.

Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me – but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (I'd fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each other's fine striations as they touched in emotion).In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; I'd grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasn't even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her.

There comes a moment when the image of our life parts company with the life itself, stands free, and, little by little, begins to rule us. Already in The Joke: “I came to realize that there was no power capable of changing the image of my person lodged somewhere in the supreme court of human destinies; that this image (even though it bore no resemblance to me) was much more real than my actual self; that I was its shadow and not it mine; that I had no right to accuse it of bearing no resemblance to me, but rather that it was I who was guilty of the nonresemblance; and that the nonresemblance was my cross, which I could not unload on anyone else, which was mine alone to bear.” And in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “Destiny has no intention of lifting a finger for Mirek (for his happiness, his security, his good spirits, his health), whereas Mirek is ready to do everything for his destiny (for its grandeur, its clarity, its beauty, its style, its intelligible meaning). He felt responsible for his destiny, but his destiny did not feel responsible for him.

Zamišljam pokretne stube (to je vrijeme), a na njima čovjeka (to sam ja) koji trči suprotno smjeru kretanja stuba; stube se, međutim, kreću brže nego ja i zato me polako odnose od cilja prema kojem sam krenuo; taj cilj (čudan cilj koji se nalazi otraga!) jest prošlost političkih procesa, prošlost dvorana u kojima se podižu ruke, prošlost straha, prošlost crnih vojnika i Lucije, prošlost koja me uklela, prošlost koju hoću odgonetnuti, razmotati, rasplesti, koja me sprječava da živim kao čovjek, to jest okrenut naprijed. A uz to ta je prošlost iz dana u dan sve udaljenija (jer se stube kreću brže nego ja) i zato sve nerješivija i nerazmrsivija, tako da trčim (s pogledom okrenutim prošlosti i nezadovoljenim osjećajem za pravdu) potpuno mrtvu trku. U svemu tome najvažniji lanac kojim bih se htio povezati s prošlošću - koji me hipnotizira - jest osveta, samo što je osveta, kako sam se upravo ovih dana uvjerio, uzaludna, kao što je uzaludna čitava ta moja trka natrag. (...) Odlaganjem, osveta se pretvara u nešto varljivo, u osobnu religiju, u mit koji se iz dana u dan sve više odvaja od ljudi na koje se odnosi, jer u mitu osvete oni ostaju kakvi su bili, a u stvarnosti (stube se neprestano kreću) odavno su se pretvorili u nešto drugo.