...of persistence

He wanted to ask her why she was resisting him, but he could not speak. Kristyna was so shy, so delicate, that love's functions lost their names in her presence. He dared use only the language of breathing and touching. Weren't they beyond the heaviness of words? Wasn't he burning within her? They were both burning with the same flame! And so, in stubborn silence, he kept attempting with his knee to force open Kristyna's tightly closed thighs.

[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera, M.]