The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.

The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

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

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

All previous crimes of the Russian empire had been committed under the cover of a discreet shadow. The deportation of a million Lithuanians, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles, the liquidation of the Crimean Tatars remain in our memory, but no photographic documentation exists; sooner or later they will therefore be proclaimed as fabrications.