It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The Tell the truth! imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to...
I believe that in matters of the heart there is no such thing as compromise. Love means that you give each other everything.
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Horror is a shock, a time of utter blindness. Horror lacks every hint of beauty. All we can see is the piercing light of an unknown event awaiting us. Sadness, on the other hand, assumes we are in the...
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false fa...
We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it...
They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him.Even then, her words had left Tomas in a strange state of melancholy, and...
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at...
Laughing deeply is living deeply.
You know, it’s really very peculiar. To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal....
History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow hi...
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the...
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one...
The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a...
Is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in t...
why does Anna Karenina kill herself? the answer seems clear enough: for years people in her world have turned away from her; she is suffering at the separation from her son, Seryozha; even if Vronsky...