Laughable Loves Quotes

“Because I'm happy that you exist at all, Elisabeth. Perhaps I love you. Perhaps I love you very much. But probably just for this reason it would be better if we remain as we are. I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“My dear
colleagues, as you know, the greatest misfortune for a man is a happy marriage; he hasn't the
slightest hope of a divorce.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“Elisabeth, can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him?”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“And remember that striptease of hers, just remember how deeply she was experiencing it! It was the saddest striptease I've ever seen. She was passionately trying to strip and at the same time she still remained in the hated confinement of her nurse's uniform. She was trying to strip and couldn't. And although she knew that she wouldn't strip, was trying to, because she wanted to communicate to us her sad and unrealizable desire to strip. Chief, she wasn't stripping, she was singing the elegy of stripping, singing about the impossibility of stripping, about the impossibility of making love, about the impossibility of living! And we didn't even want to hear it. We looked at the floor and we were unsympathetic.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves