(...) the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
identity, inspirational-quotes, litost, love, torment