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"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 Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
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Exlpore more Companionship quotes
"It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God."
"Sometimes a woman needs a man for company, no matter how useless he is."
"We was used to each other in the way I s'pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they're a long way from what you'd call the best of friends."
"And if I'm alone in bed, I will go to the window, look up at the sky, and feel certain that loneliness is a lie, because the Universe is there to keep me company."
"To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off."
"John Grady looked at the table. The paper cat stepped thin and slant among the shapes of cats thereon. He looked up again. Yessir, he said. Just me and him."
"Sure. You want to be touched, inspired and made to feel alive. But a relationship is like a bridge where you meet other people half-way. That means if you want to be touched, inspired and made to feel alive, you have to be touching, inspiring and bring the fire of your aliveness to the union of your companionship."
"She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position, it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship."
"There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with."
"This good fellowship - camaraderie - usually occurring through the similarity of pursuits is unfortunately seldom super-added to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labors but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstances permit its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death - that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, besides which the passion usually called by the name is as evanescent as steam."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love."
"Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."
"Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company."
"They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live."
"The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers."
"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos."
"Therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children."
"For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability."
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