nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.

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.

Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.

He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.

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

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)