The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Part 1.1 (p4)
... the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. The mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit?

... the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

Part 3.3 (p91)
But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off in the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

Part 3.4 (p98)
She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women, Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.

Part 4.8 (p142)
What is flirtation? One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

Part 4.28 (p169)
But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

Part 5.23 (238)
He suddenly recall the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.