Source — Goodreads quote page, Kundera's litost definition (via Rabih Alameddine)
- Title: "In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state..." (quote page)
- Publication: Goodreads (quote attributed to Rabih Alameddine's novel An Unnecessary Woman, which itself quotes Kundera)
- URL: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7264129-in-czech-according-to-milan-kundera-litost-is-a-state
- Accessed: 2026-09-03
- Type: tertiary (a quotation-aggregation page, one level removed from the primary novel text), neutral — used here only to independently cross-check exact wording, not as primary evidence of Kundera's text.
Extract
Exact quoted wording: "litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery." This independently corroborates the wording found via Wikipedia and multiple other secondary sources ("a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery") — cross-checked because an initial WebFetch synthesis of a different page had garbled the quote as "...one's own mystery" (a synthesis error, not a source variant; discarded per this project's standing fence on WebFetch/WebSearch synthesis reliability).
Gaps
- Does not itself state which English translation (Heim 1980 or Asher 1996) the wording is drawn from, or the exact page number in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.