“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.”
“They could be silent.”
“Like those two, at the next table?” Jean-Marc laughed. “Oh no, no love can survive mutness.”

Milan [...]

“But no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there’s no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves or some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.”
Milan Kundera Identity

“Nostalgia? How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? (Jean-Marc knew how to answer that: you can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more; if [...]

Friendship is indispensable to man for the proper function of his memory. Remembering our past, carrying it with us always, may be the necessary requirement or maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be [...]