Suzette > Suzette's Quotes

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an 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 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?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There is no perfection only life”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
― Henry James

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined.”
― Henry James

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Sorrow comes in great waves...but rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us, it leaves us. And we know that if it is strong, we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain.”
― Henry James

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I always want to know the things one shouldn't do."
"So as to do them?" asked her aunt.
"So as to choose," said Isabel”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“I call people rich when they're able to meet the requirements of their imagination.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.”
― Henry James, Theory of Fiction: Henry James

“Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.”
― Henry James, The art of fiction

“Obstacles are those frightening things you see when you take you eyes off your goal.”
― Henry James

“The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.”
― Henry James