For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.

Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

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.