Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Biography
Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova ulice 6 (6 Purkyňova Street) in Brno Czechoslovakia to a middle-class family. Milan Kundera (Czech pronunciation: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]; born 1 April 1929) is the Czech Republic's most recognized living writer.

A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature he has been nominated on several occasions. Of Czech origin he has lived in exile in France since 1975 having become a naturalised citizen in 1981.