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“ ”But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously the image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
About Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic).
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Milan Kundera
Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.
...beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.
Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.