If you were to get a literary tattoo, what would you get?

I ask because NPR's "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook (heart him) discussed this trend.  Kundera on the tummy?  Tempting......tempting.

Tattoos were once for sailors and wayfarers — exotic souvenirs of adventure and romance. Now, they’re mainstream. Walk into any college gym – any gym, anywhere – and you know.

But literary tattoos – now there’s the high frontier. And even it is becoming wildly populated. Rimbaud on the forearm. Kafka on the whole arm. Sylvia Plath across the chest. Kundera on the abdomen. A big back covered in Proust. Oh my.

We take the full tour today of the world of literary tattoos to see what’s there, and why.

-Tom Ashbrook

Listen to the program



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And while I'm thinking of Kundera (just started Immortality), here are some parts I underlined in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:


"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." p. 208

"We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under.

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public...The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes...Then there is the third category, the category of who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love...And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present." pp. 269-270


"For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs as heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." p. 31


"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." p. 8


"And at some point, he realized to his great surprise that he was not particularly unhappy. Sabina's physical presence was much less important than he had suspected. What was important was the golden footprint, the magic footprint she had left on his life and no one could ever remove." p. 120

"On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth." p 63

"What is unique about the 'I' it hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual 'I' is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered." p. 199

"Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love." p. 11