For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Porque el joven era consciente a veces de que el mundo en que vive es un laberinto de valores cuya importancia intuye apenas vagamente y que, por lo tanto, sólo pueden dejar de ser valores...

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...

Children, Never look Back!” and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical...

Tous les hommes politiques d’aujourd’hui, selon Pontevin, sont un peu danseurs, et tous les danseurs se mêlent de politique, ce qui, toutefois, ne devrait pas nous amener à les confondre. Le danseur se distingue de...

L’homme ne peut jamais savoir ce qu’il faut vouloir car il n’a qu’une vie et il ne peut ni la comparer à des vies antérieures ni la rectifier dans des vies ultérieures. (…) Il n’existe...

He thought: that’s certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That’s how it happens that one fine day a person...

vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they’ve memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so...

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occa­sionally upset at the sight of her mother’s features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt...

By revealing to Tomas her dream about jabbing needles under her fingernails, Tereza unwittingly revealed that she had gone through his desk. If Tereza had been any other woman, Tomas would never have spoken to...

La única explicación que encuentro es la de que el amor no era para él una prolongación de su vida pública, sino el polo opuesto. Significaba para él el deseo de ponerse a merced de...

Chantal se siente a salvo, porque la voz de Jean-Marc es la voz del amor, la voz cuya existencia había olvidado en aquellos momentos de desconcierto, la voz del amor que la acaricia y la...

Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.

All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How...

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman’s genitals was through her sadness.

But it was not only a feeling of guilt which drove him into danger. He detested the pettiness that made life semilife and men semimen. He wished to put his life on one of a...

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at...

Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. “You mean you were really jealous?” she asked him ten times or...

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it....

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well...

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

Être élu est une notion théologique qui veut dire : sans aucun mérite, par un verdict surnaturel, par une volonté libre, sinon capricieuse, de Dieu, on est choisi pour quelque chose d’exceptionnel et d’extraordinaire. C’est...

When he told F. of his disgust at the eyelid’s movement, he must have been sixteen. When he decided to study medicine, he must have been nineteen; by then, having already signed on to the...

I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling...

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind...

Ya hoy la historia no es más que la estrecha hebra de lo recordado sobre el océano de lo olvidado, pero el tiempo sigue su marcha y llegará la época en que los años tengan...

Tereza tried to see herself through her body. That is why, from girlhood on, she would stand before the mirror so often. And because she was afraid her mother would catch her at it, every...

Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they too, fade away.

El amor empieza por una metafora. Dicho de otro modo; el amor empieza en el momento en que una mujer inscribe su primera palabra en nuestra memoria poética.

Le roman n’est pas une confession de l’auteur, mais une exploration de ce qu’est la vie humaine dans le piège qu’est devenu le monde.

Ése es uno de los curiosos secretos de la vida, el de que los inocentes cargan con la culpa en lugar de los culpables.

You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all....

As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated...

He was looking for immensity. His life was hopelessly small, everything surrounding him was nondescript and gray. And death is absolute; it is indivisible and indissoluble. The presence of the girl was pathetic (a few...

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author...

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 question. There...

Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there aren’t all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool,...

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that...

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from...

Al igual que todos nosotros, Klima también consideraba real únicamente aquello que llega a nuestra vida desde dentro, gradual, orgánicamente, mientras que a lo que llega desde fuera, inesperada y casualmente, lo veía como si...

En travaux pratiques de physique, n’importe quel collégien peut faire des expériences pour vérifier l’exactitude d’une hypothèse scientifique. Mais l’homme, parce qu’il n’a qu’une seule vie, n’a aucune possibilité de vérifier l’hypothèse par l’expérience de...

The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes...

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays,...

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?

In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves...