The Joke Quotes.

11. "Youth is terrible: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and a variety of costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand. And history is terrible because it so often ends up a playground for the immature; a playground for the young Nero, a playground for the young Bonaparte, a playground for the easily roused mobs of children whose simulated passions and simplistic poses suddenly metamorphose into a catastrophically real reality."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

12. "The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)"
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

13. "I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)"
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

14. "In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

15. "What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?"
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

16. "Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)"
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

17. "A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

18. "لقد تأصل لدي عدم التصديق ، إلى حد أنه حين يفضي إليّ امرؤ بما يحب أو لا يحب ، لم أكن أحمل كل هذا على محمل الجد أو لم أكن ، بصورة أكثر دقة ، أرى فيه سوى مجرد شهادة على الصورة التي يريد إعطاءها عن نفسه !."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

19. "It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

20. "Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke