When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.

By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

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