Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.
Interpretation
Relationships require consistent care and attention, especially in the beginning.
This quote by Milan Kundera highlights the importance of sustaining romantic gestures and attentiveness in a relationship from the very start. It implies that initial actions, such as bringing breakfast in bed, set expectations that might become burdensome, as partners may believe that such gestures should continue indefinitely to prove love and commitment.
In practice
During a relationship seminar, a speaker might reference this quote to discuss the expectations set in the early days of a romance.
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.
Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Born in the same land, we ought to live as brothers, doing to each other all the good we can, and not listening to wicked men, who may endeavor to make us enemies. By living in peace, we can help and prosper one another; by waging war, we can kill and destroy many on both sides; but those who survive will not be the happier for that.
The language of violence that many whites use to describe anti-racist endeavors is not without significance, as it is another example of how white fragility distorts reality.
No thank you to all the bustas, cowards, and FAKE HOMIES who showed me the depths of jealousy, envy and greed.
Until you have become really, in actual fact, as brother to everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass.
If the best of one's feelings means nothing to the person most concerned in those feelings, what reality is left us?
Women may fall when there's no strength in men.
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