Kundera

The Unbearable 
Lightness of 
Being

"...I began to divide books into day books and night books," she went on. "Really, there are books meant for daytime reading and books that can be read only at night."

...

"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

...

Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.

...

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful... Kneeling by her as she lay sleeping in his bed, he realized that someone had sent her downstream in a bulrush basket. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

13

Recently she had made another entry into his mind. Returning home with the milk one morning as usual, she stood in the doorway with a crow wrapped in her red scarf and pressed against her breast. It was the way gypsies held their babies. He would never forget it: the crow's enormous plaintive beak up next to her face. She had found it half-buried..."It was children," she said, and her words...revealed an unexpected repugnance...