The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being.

When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.