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Whe you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful and polite, you have a hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true, that nothing is sincere. Maintaining nonbelief requires a tremendous effort and the proper training. -- Milan Kundera
Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcome into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased
(..describing how Karenin, Tereza's pet dog welcomed each day) -- Milan Kundera
Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost. -- Milan Kundera
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight. -- Milan Kundera
I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement. -- Milan Kundera
Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed. -- Milan Kundera
Oh, all that was so far away, almost forgotten. But during her mother's five-day stay in Paris, that feeling of inferiority, of weakness, of dependency came over her again. -- Milan Kundera
In spite of their love, they had made each other's life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconstancy of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak. -- Milan Kundera
[ ... ] in his whole life he had never acted as he wished to act. He considered himself the administrator of his own immortality, and that responsibility tied him down and turned him stiff and prim. -- Milan Kundera
Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write. -- Milan Kundera
The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries. -- Milan Kundera
The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy. -- Milan Kundera
Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is a dangerous as the situation in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. -- Milan Kundera
My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form. -- Milan Kundera
For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. -- Milan Kundera
She thought that after what she had been through during the invasion she would stop being petty and grow up, grow wise and strong, but she had overestimated herself -- Milan Kundera
Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that is merits being duplicated. -- Milan Kundera
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals. -- Milan Kundera
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise. -- Milan Kundera
To take seriously something so unserious means to lose all one's own seriousness -- Milan Kundera
It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries... -- Milan Kundera
Don't lie!' 'Tell the truth!' are words which we must never say to another person in so far as we consider him our equal. -- Milan Kundera
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?
You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more -- Milan Kundera
No love can survive muteness. -- Milan Kundera
There was not a scrap of tangible evidence to show that he had spent the most wonderful year of his life with her.
Which only increased his desire to remain faithful to her. -- Milan Kundera
If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world. -- Milan Kundera
Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought. -- Milan Kundera
To laugh is to live profoundly ... The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter ... it is an expression of being rejoicing at being ... -- Milan Kundera
Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change. -- Milan Kundera
We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places! -- Milan Kundera
The mediation of a woman is capable of imposing on hatred certain qualities characteristic of affection, for example curiosity, carnal interest, the urge to cross the threshold of intimacy. -- Milan Kundera
You must understand that by this time the only choice was among several varieties of defeat, but the town in question rejected compromise and would settle for nothing but victory. That was not reason talking; that was the voice of litost! -- Milan Kundera
After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland.
A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality. -- Milan Kundera
[ ... ] when it's a question of wahre Liebe, true love, the beloved hardly matters. -- Milan Kundera
Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy; the Animals. -- Milan Kundera
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. -- Milan Kundera
This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared. -- Milan Kundera
Here he was, doing things he didn't care a damn about, and enjoying it. -- Milan Kundera
The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content -- Milan Kundera
The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins. -- Milan Kundera
When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp? -- Milan Kundera
In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties. -- Milan Kundera
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realized that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them. -- Milan Kundera
He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street. -- Milan Kundera
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other. -- Milan Kundera
The man of fantasy must become the man of action, the adventure of dreams the adventure of life. -- Milan Kundera
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten. -- Milan Kundera
The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. -- Milan Kundera
Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth. -- Milan Kundera
We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. -- Milan Kundera
In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head, and says: I know just what you mean. -- Milan Kundera
pleasure without happiness is not pleasure. -- Milan Kundera
A whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing -- Milan Kundera
Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray. -- Milan Kundera
It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. ( ... ) The "Tell the truth!" imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman. -- Milan Kundera
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death. -- Milan Kundera
To laugh is to live profoundly. -- Milan Kundera
Certainty. Life's last and kindest gift. -- Milan Kundera
Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. -- Milan Kundera
Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. -- Milan Kundera
High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor ... -- Milan Kundera
She knew she was being unfair ... ; she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how. -- Milan Kundera
Revolution in Love'. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity? -- Milan Kundera
We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has. -- Milan Kundera
Man passes through the present with his eyes blindfolded. He is permitted merely to sense and guess at what he is actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can he glance at the past and find out what he has experienced and what meaning it has had. -- Milan Kundera
And think about the precise meaning of that term: a Narcissus is not proud. A proud man has disdain for other people, he undervalues them. The Narcissus overvalues them, because in every person's eyes he sees his own image, and wants to embellish it. So he takes nice care of all his mirrors. -- Milan Kundera
To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. -- Milan Kundera
In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty. -- Milan Kundera
Change the world! In Pontevin's view, what a monstrous goal! Not because the world is so admirable as it is but because any change leads inevitably to something worse. -- Milan Kundera
No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women. -- Milan Kundera
No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? -- Milan Kundera
You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue. -- Milan Kundera
From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? ... Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown. -- Milan Kundera
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic. -- Milan Kundera
I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. -- Milan Kundera
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste. -- Milan Kundera
For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake. -- Milan Kundera
Loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away. -- Milan Kundera
No one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it. -- Milan Kundera
The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern. -- Milan Kundera
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it. -- Milan Kundera
Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness. -- Milan Kundera
This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted. -- Milan Kundera
It's hard to live with people willing to send you to exile or death. It's hard to become intimate with them. It's hard to love them. -- Milan Kundera
I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself -- Milan Kundera
A man may ask anything of a woman, but unless he wishes to behave like a brute, he must make it possible for her to act in harmony with her deepest self-deceptions. -- Milan Kundera
She began to teeter as she walked, fell almost daily, bumped into things or, at the very least, dropped objects. She was in the grip of an insuperable longing to fall. She lived in a constant state of vertigo. 'Pick me up,' is the message of a person who keeps falling. -- Milan Kundera
the whole mystery -- Milan Kundera
Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? -- Milan Kundera
Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? -- Milan Kundera
Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various scientific hypothesis. But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion or not. -- Milan Kundera
It takes a very great intelligence to breathe logical meaning into meaningless ideas. -- Milan Kundera
In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. -- Milan Kundera
A man has a right to fear dangers that are less than likely to occur. -- Milan Kundera
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. -- Milan Kundera
The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. -- Milan Kundera
If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him. -- Milan Kundera
An optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise. -- Milan Kundera
Given the nature of the human couple, the love of a man and a woman is a priori inferior to that which can exist (at least in the best instances) in the love between man and dog ... It is a completely selfless love. -- Milan Kundera
[M]an has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and other's. (p.130) -- Milan Kundera
Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecstatic laughter is without memory and desire, for he is emitting his shout into the world's present moment and wishes to know only that. -- Milan Kundera
Even a life of suffering has a mysterious value. Even a life on the threshold of death is a thing of splendor. Anyone who has not looked death in the face does not know this, but I know it ... -- Milan Kundera
The formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them; such is true perfection; only among the small masters does novelty seek to call attention to itself. -- Milan Kundera
And I felt happy inside these songs ( ... ) where sorrow is not lightness, laughter is not grimace, love is not laughable, and hatred is not timid, where people love with body and solu ( ... ), where they dance in joy ... -- Milan Kundera
Birds of fortuity flutter down on her shoulders ... -- Milan Kundera
People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles cease to exist. -- Milan Kundera
Optimism is the opium of the people. -- Milan Kundera
Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood. -- Milan Kundera
Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth. -- Milan Kundera
All predictions are wrong, that's one of the few certainties granted to mankind. -- Milan Kundera
It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules. -- Milan Kundera
A person finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own. -- Milan Kundera
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters. -- Milan Kundera
Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety.
At any rate that afforded me some comfort. -- Milan Kundera
Not everything written on Kafka is Kafkology. How then to define Kafkology? By a tautology: Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka. -- Milan Kundera
Vertigo is something else than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defense ourselves. -- Milan Kundera
To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain -- Milan Kundera
Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman). -- Milan Kundera
Only cactuses had perennial appeal. And cactuses were of no interest to her. -- Milan Kundera
And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any. -- Milan Kundera
The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models - those that are in fashion, that suit, that please - and enact them. -- Milan Kundera
And I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but at least was asbolutely serious about marrying her one day -- Milan Kundera
Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts. -- Milan Kundera
Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms ... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest ... within a forest ... a thousand years ago. -- Milan Kundera
There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize. -- Milan Kundera
Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions. -- Milan Kundera
Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year. -- Milan Kundera
Everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late ... -- Milan Kundera
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. -- Milan Kundera
Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass. -- Milan Kundera
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? -- Milan Kundera
By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors. -- Milan Kundera
[mother] belonged to a realm of other creatures: smaller, lighter, more easily blown away. -- Milan Kundera
That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status. -- Milan Kundera
How can she explain to Gustaf that within the magic circle of maternal energy, Irena has never manage to rule over her own life? How can she explain that the constant proximity of the mother would throw her back, into her weakness, her immaturity? -- Milan Kundera
He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. -- Milan Kundera
The life we have left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court. -- Milan Kundera
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. -- Milan Kundera
Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman. -- Milan Kundera
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library. -- Milan Kundera
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends. -- Milan Kundera
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition. -- Milan Kundera
The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas. -- Milan Kundera
People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time. -- Milan Kundera
Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams. -- Milan Kundera
Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God! -- Milan Kundera
First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life. -- Milan Kundera
For what is love if one loves a woman without knowing her? Just a decision to love? Or even an imitation? The question concerns us all: If, from our childhood on, the examples of love were not there inviting us to copy them, would we know what "loving" means? -- Milan Kundera
Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself. -- Milan Kundera
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value. -- Milan Kundera
The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.'
Where to?' The girl feigned surprise.
Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man.
Is that any way to talk to me?'
It's the way I talk to whores. -- Milan Kundera
When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere. -- Milan Kundera
Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being. -- Milan Kundera
We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? -- Milan Kundera
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death. -- Milan Kundera
Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it. -- Milan Kundera
But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything. -- Milan Kundera
The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. -- Milan Kundera
When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed. -- Milan Kundera
Now what was tiring had disappeared and only the beauty remained.
Saturday found him for the first time strolling alone through Zurich, breathing in the heady smell of his freedom. New adventures hid around each corner. The future was again a secret. -- Milan Kundera
But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless. -- Milan Kundera
How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up? -- Milan Kundera
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us. -- Milan Kundera
He had entered Parmenides' magic field: he was enjoying the sweet lightness of being. -- Milan Kundera
I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able to escape my bigamous state."
Milan Kundera, "The Paris Review" summer 1984 no. 92 -- Milan Kundera
No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. -- Milan Kundera
Because people who decline organized leisure activities are deserters from the great common struggle against boredom, and they deserve neither attention nor helmets. -- Milan Kundera
Laughing deeply is living deeply. -- Milan Kundera
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other. -- Milan Kundera
But once he got over the astounding strangeness of his new life (it took him about a week), he suddenly realized he was simply on a long holiday. -- Milan Kundera
Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music
pg 52 -- Milan Kundera
You are beautiful," he said, "But I will have to leave you. -- Milan Kundera
The best actors do not let the wheels show. -- Milan Kundera
Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings. -- Milan Kundera
Love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love. -- Milan Kundera
Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics. -- Milan Kundera
Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time. -- Milan Kundera
Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of earth abd his earthy being, and become half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. -- Milan Kundera
Does he love me?Does he love anyone more than me?Does he love me more than I love him?Perhap sall the questions we ask of love,to measure,test,probe,and save it,have the additional effect of cutting it short. -- Milan Kundera
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable. -- Milan Kundera
Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea. -- Milan Kundera
He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them. -- Milan Kundera
Dictionary of Misunderstood Words -- Milan Kundera
A man is responsible for his ignorance. -- Milan Kundera
He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears. He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly filled her with sadness. She felt sad that he loved her so much, and she felt like crying. -- Milan Kundera
There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos. -- Milan Kundera
The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish. -- Milan Kundera
When I was a little boy in short pants, I dreamed about a miraculous ointment that would make me invisible. Then I became an adult, began to write, and wanted to be successful. Now I'm successful and would like to have the ointment that would make me invisible. -- Milan Kundera
He was happier with Sabina the invisible goddess than the Sabina who had accompanied him throughout the world and whose love he constantly feared losing. -- Milan Kundera
And she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies. -- Milan Kundera
Her image of it came entirely from what she had heard. Or read. Or received unconsciously from distant ancestors. And yet it lived within her. -- Milan Kundera
It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France. -- Milan Kundera
The religion of orgasm: utilitarianism projected into sex life; efficiency versus indolence; coition reduced to an obstacle to be got past as quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion, the only true goal of love-making and of the universe. -- Milan Kundera
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 ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. -- Milan Kundera
Love begins with a metaphor, which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetice memory.
pg 209 -- Milan Kundera
I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. -- Milan Kundera
But though predictions may be wrong, they are right about the people who voice them, not about their future but about their experience of the present moment -- Milan Kundera
Each interpreted the other's words in his own way, and the lived in perfect harmony, the perfect solidarity of perfect Mutual misunderstanding. -- Milan Kundera
It's not your enemies who condemn you to solitude, it's your friends -- Milan Kundera
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. -- Milan Kundera
They were happy not in spite of their sadness but thanks to it. -- Milan Kundera
It is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences ... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty. -- Milan Kundera
The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen -- Milan Kundera
Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs. -- Milan Kundera
It is entirely possible," said Tomas, "that a female dog addressed continually by a male name will develop lesbian tendencies. -- Milan Kundera
Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood. -- Milan Kundera
Pick me up, is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently. -- Milan Kundera
Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? the potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? the drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness? -- Milan Kundera
We go through the present blindfolded ... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realise what we've been through and understand what it means. -- Milan Kundera
Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria. -- Milan Kundera
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos. -- Milan Kundera
The larger the searchlight, the larger the searchlight of the unknown. -- Milan Kundera
[ ... ] ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars, revolutions, reforms. The wheels of immunology turn without having any effect upon History. -- Milan Kundera
And I felt fear. Fear of that bleak horizon, fear of that destiny. I felt my soul shriveling, I felt it retreating, and I was frightened by the thought that it could not escape its encirclement. -- Milan Kundera
To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in. -- Milan Kundera
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made. -- Milan Kundera
On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract. -- Milan Kundera
She fixed him with a long careful, searching stare that was not devoid of irony's intelligent sparkle -- Milan Kundera
The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart. -- Milan Kundera
Beauty by mistake'
the final phase in the history of beauty. -- Milan Kundera
But how to define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel? -- Milan Kundera
Children, Never look Back! and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory . for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles. -- Milan Kundera
But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not. -- Milan Kundera
Einmal ist keinmal. What happens but once might as well not have happened at all. -- Milan Kundera
Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth. -- Milan Kundera
Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends ... and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death. -- Milan Kundera
He could not quite understand what had happened. he began to sense an aura of hitherto unknown happiness emanating from them -- Milan Kundera
Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world.
But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain. -- Milan Kundera
Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist; translators are more important than members of the European Parliament. -- Milan Kundera
...Perhaps New York's unintentional beauty is much richer and more varied than the excessively strict and composed beauty of human design. But it's not our European beauty. It's an alien world. -- Milan Kundera
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster. -- Milan Kundera
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say. -- Milan Kundera
Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back. -- Milan Kundera
Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. -- Milan Kundera
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. -- Milan Kundera
He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences. -- Milan Kundera
The brevity of his life makes the sky a dark lid against which he will forever crack his head, to fall back onto earth, where everything alive eats and can be eaten. -- Milan Kundera
Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions. -- Milan Kundera
Is goodwill so fragile, so precarious a thing, then? (Of course, dear fellow, of course) -- Milan Kundera
Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume to correct attitude to her unchosen faith. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as taking pride in it. -- Milan Kundera
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. -- Milan Kundera
What those years said of themselves was that they were the most joyous of years, and anyone who failed to rejoice was immediately suspected of lamenting the victory of the working class or |what was equally sinful| giving way individualistically to inner sorrows. -- Milan Kundera
She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body! -- Milan Kundera
I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree, and there is nothing I can do against that. -- Milan Kundera
Adventure, the first great theme of the novel. -- Milan Kundera
In our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener) -- Milan Kundera
Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female in the world. -- Milan Kundera
Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe. -- Milan Kundera
Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event. -- Milan Kundera
Therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children. -- Milan Kundera
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality. -- Milan Kundera
Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible. -- Milan Kundera
Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. -- Milan Kundera
The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. -- Milan Kundera
And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence. -- Milan Kundera
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression. -- Milan Kundera
Elisabeth, can't you imagine that you could love someone so terribly that just because of it you couldn't go to bed with him? -- Milan Kundera
I feel a frantic desire to free myself. To start all over again and in another way. -- Milan Kundera
I say, indeed: "consolation in the nonsentience of nature." For nonsentience is consoling; the world of nonsentience is the world outside human life; it is eternity; "it is the sea gone off with the sun" (Rimbaud). -- Milan Kundera
Dogs are our link to paradise. -- Milan Kundera
Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love. -- Milan Kundera
I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you. -- Milan Kundera
The ostriches were like messengers who had learned their vital message by heart, but whose vocal chords had been slit by the enemy, so that when they finally reached their goal, all they could do was move their mouths. -- Milan Kundera
When someone is young, he is not capable of conceiving of time as a circle, but thinks of it as a road leading forward to ever-new horizons; he does not yet sense that his life contains just a single theme; he will come to realise it only when his life begins to enact its first variations. -- Milan Kundera
But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it? -- Milan Kundera
In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. -- Milan Kundera
Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders. -- Milan Kundera
The termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. -- Milan Kundera
She must jump from square to square, right leg first, then left, then both together, and make a show of caring whether or not she steps on a line. She must go on jumping day after day, bearing the burden of time on her shoulders like a cross that grows heavier from day to day. -- Milan Kundera
He goes on reading, and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under Josef's name? -- Milan Kundera
The reign of imagology begins where history ends -- Milan Kundera
And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film. -- Milan Kundera
What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion. -- Milan Kundera
Physical love is unthinkable without violence. -- Milan Kundera
But who then was he? What could his own self really consist of? He bent over that self in order to peer into it, but all he could find was the reflection of himself bending over himself to peer into that self ... Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere -- Milan Kundera
She had experienced something beautiful, and he had failed to experience it with her. The two ways in which their memories reacted to the evening storm sharply delimit love and non-love. -- Milan Kundera
And then I realized how powerless I was to revoke my own joke when throughout my life as a whole I was involved in a joke much more vast (all-embracing for me) and utterly irrevocable. -- Milan Kundera
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. -- Milan Kundera
She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness. -- Milan Kundera
She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her. -- Milan Kundera
Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not attain. -- Milan Kundera
I beg you friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope. -- Milan Kundera
Is not parody the eternal lot of man? -- Milan Kundera
The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become -- Milan Kundera
Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved -- Milan Kundera
Jaromil had always regarded the future as an awesome mystery. It comprised everything unknown, and for that reason it lured and terrified. It was the opposite of certainty, the opposite of home. -- Milan Kundera
He looked down at her and realized how lovely she was and how difficult it would be to tear himself away. But the world beyond the window was even more beautiful. And if he was leaving a beloved woman for its sake, then that world would be even more enhanced by the price of a betrayed love. -- Milan Kundera
The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses. -- Milan Kundera
Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying. -- Milan Kundera
The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded. -- Milan Kundera
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away. -- Milan Kundera
How goodness heightens beauty! -- Milan Kundera
But deep down she said to herself, Franz may be strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. -- Milan Kundera
When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones? -- Milan Kundera
His kindness tore at her heartstrings... -- Milan Kundera
It was time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living pure time - pure, vacant time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight. -- Milan Kundera
Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel. -- Milan Kundera
Homo sentimentalis [ ... ] a man who has raised feelings to a category of value. As soon as feelings are seen as value, everyone wants to feel; and because we all like to pride ourselves on our values, we have a tendency to show off our feelings. -- Milan Kundera
I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values. -- Milan Kundera
Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell. -- Milan Kundera
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33) -- Milan Kundera
[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all ... (p.24) -- Milan Kundera
Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions. -- Milan Kundera
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails. -- Milan Kundera
Punishing people who don't know what they've done is barbaric"
" forgive them for know not what they do -- Milan Kundera
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them. -- Milan Kundera
That's how it is: even in the throes of death, man is always on stage. And even 'the plainest' of them, the least exhibitionist, because it's not always the man himself who climbs on stage. If he doesn't do it, someone will put him there. That is his fate as a man. -- Milan Kundera
The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man. -- Milan Kundera
We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. -- Milan Kundera
It's a great consolation to think that when we've long been in the grave our noses will still be strolling the earth. -- Milan Kundera
The eye the point where a person's identity is concentrated. -- Milan Kundera
How was she to reconcile men's desire with the desire to be beautiful in their eyes? At first she had tried for a compromise (desperate journeys abroad, where nobody knew her and no indiscretion could betray her); then, later on, she had gone radical and sacrificed her erotic life to her beauty. -- Milan Kundera
Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's. -- Milan Kundera
Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual's life. -- Milan Kundera
And she thinks, almost joyfully, that it's fine this way because the truth is finally revealed: she feels no need to understand him or to have him understand her. -- Milan Kundera
She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness. -- Milan Kundera
In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood -- Milan Kundera
not even one's own pain weigh so heavy as the pain one feels with someone , for someone -- Milan Kundera
The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps. -- Milan Kundera
Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it. -- Milan Kundera
Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper. (pp.28-29) -- Milan Kundera
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant. -- Milan Kundera
He took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love. -- Milan Kundera
For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. -- Milan Kundera
She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance. -- Milan Kundera
Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything. -- Milan Kundera
That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. -- Milan Kundera
Every situation is of man's making and can only contain what man contains. -- Milan Kundera
[B]ut pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable. -- Milan Kundera
If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency. -- Milan Kundera
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful. -- Milan Kundera
A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea. -- Milan Kundera
The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood. -- Milan Kundera
It was as though she has found refuge inside a shell and the only sound she could hear was the sea of an inimical world. -- Milan Kundera
Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work. -- Milan Kundera
If God's masons built real walls, I doubt we'd be able to destroy them. But instead of walls all I see is backdrops, sets. And sets are made to be destroyed. -- Milan Kundera
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs. -- Milan Kundera
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all. -- Milan Kundera
Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude. -- Milan Kundera
The crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It's the absolute death. -- Milan Kundera
What's the matter?" he asked
"nothing"
"what do you want me to do for you?"
"i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older"
what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am. -- Milan Kundera
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. -- Milan Kundera
The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity ... The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity ... a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future. -- Milan Kundera
Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs. -- Milan Kundera
Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it. -- Milan Kundera
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup. -- Milan Kundera
History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow. -- Milan Kundera
Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. -- Milan Kundera
Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148) -- Milan Kundera
He who gives himself up like a prisoner of war must give up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. -- Milan Kundera
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all. -- Milan Kundera
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. -- Milan Kundera
The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic. -- Milan Kundera
He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life. -- Milan Kundera
A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue "something higher"- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books. -- Milan Kundera
a man possessed with peace is always smiling -- Milan Kundera
For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability. -- Milan Kundera
She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. -- Milan Kundera
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice. -- Milan Kundera
Beauty is a spark which flares up when two ages meet across the distance of time, ... beauty is a clean sweep of chronology, a rebellion against time. -- Milan Kundera
There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium. -- Milan Kundera
But the world was too ugly, and no one decided to rise up out of the grave. -- Milan Kundera
What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating. -- Milan Kundera
At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border? -- Milan Kundera
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life. -- Milan Kundera
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth. -- Milan Kundera
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero? -- Milan Kundera
It follows, then, that the aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. -- Milan Kundera
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! -- Milan Kundera
Love is a desire for that lost half of ourselves. -- Milan Kundera
Every human life has many aspects. The past of each one of us can be just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statesman as into that of a criminal. -- Milan Kundera
Solitude: a sweet absence of looks. -- Milan Kundera
If rejection and priviledge are one and the same, if there is no difference between the sublime and the paltry, if Son of God can undergo judgement of shit, then human existence loses its dimensions and becomes unbearable light. -- Milan Kundera
In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster -- Milan Kundera
No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live. -- Milan Kundera
I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. -- Milan Kundera
The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal. -- Milan Kundera
He tried to remind himself , don't think about her! don't think about her! he said to himself, i am sick with compassion -- Milan Kundera
The humble histories of hearts cannot be brushed aside forever by the great events of nations. -- Milan Kundera
Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. -- Milan Kundera
It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier, seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense -- Milan Kundera
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it. -- Milan Kundera
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring
it was peace. -- Milan Kundera
The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security -- Milan Kundera
Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy. -- Milan Kundera
Such forced compromises with the spirit of the times, though quite banal, are actually inevitable unless we are ready to ask everyone who doesn't like our century to join in a general strike. -- Milan Kundera
The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. -- Milan Kundera
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory. -- Milan Kundera
Of course, these were only dreams. How could a sensible woman leave a happy marriage? All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. -- Milan Kundera
If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and make it the object of our game; to turn it into a toy -- Milan Kundera
Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. -- Milan Kundera
our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. "co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time. -- Milan Kundera
Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. -- Milan Kundera
He reflected that he had only one life and that he wanted to live it somewhere else. -- Milan Kundera
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be. -- Milan Kundera
An old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past. -- Milan Kundera
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting -- Milan Kundera
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? -- Milan Kundera
So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game. -- Milan Kundera
Murder simply hastens a bit what God will eventually see to on His own. -- Milan Kundera
All novels ... are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped? -- Milan Kundera
You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange. -- Milan Kundera
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated. -- Milan Kundera
And so the man who called to her was simultaneously a stranger and a member of the secret brotherhood. He called to her in a kind voice, and Tereza felt her soul rushing up to the surface through her blood vessels. -- Milan Kundera
I have a strong will to love you for eternity. -- Milan Kundera
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him. -- Milan Kundera
There is nothing harder to explain than humor. -- Milan Kundera
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure. -- Milan Kundera
I have no mission. No one has. -- Milan Kundera
The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters. -- Milan Kundera
How defenseless we are in the face of flattery! -- Milan Kundera
I want you to be weak. As weak as I am. -- Milan Kundera
To hide and feel guilty would be the beginning of defeat -- Milan Kundera
The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence -- Milan Kundera
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people. -- Milan Kundera
Tereza burst out laughing
Thomas laughed with her -- Milan Kundera
And even if she did find them ugly, she would never say so, because flattery had long since become second nature to her -- Milan Kundera
If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life. -- Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side ... nudity is a shroud. -- Milan Kundera
He was down and out, the Catholics took him in, and before he knew it, he had faith. So it was gratitude that decided the issue, most likely. Human decisions are terribly simple. -- Milan Kundera
There is no perfection only life -- Milan Kundera
Sad company is bad company. -- Milan Kundera
Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women? -- Milan Kundera
Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations. -- Milan Kundera
After all, when you give someone a present, you want to do so out of love, you want to give your friend a piece of heart! -- Milan Kundera
Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her. -- Milan Kundera
Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines. -- Milan Kundera
life is like weeds -- Milan Kundera
Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously. -- Milan Kundera
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave. -- Milan Kundera
A novel is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas, it questions, it marvels, it doesn't judge, nor proclaims truths. -- Milan Kundera
No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reign in the cemetery. -- Milan Kundera
Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. -- Milan Kundera
There is nothing rare about the merging of the bodies of two strangers. Even the Union of souls may occasionally take place. What is a thousand times more rare is the union of the body with its own soul in shared passion. -- Milan Kundera
Beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery. -- Milan Kundera
Let us consider the critic, therefore, as a discoverer of discoveries. -- Milan Kundera
He nourished the cult of Sabina more as religion than as love. -- Milan Kundera
Anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself. -- Milan Kundera
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes! -- Milan Kundera
Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing. -- Milan Kundera
He knew perfectly well that his petition would not help the prisoners. His true goal was not to free to prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist. -- Milan Kundera
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. -- Milan Kundera
Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. -- Milan Kundera
How defenceless we are in the face of flattery! -- Milan Kundera
A sudden happiness, a feeling of bliss, the joy that came of freedom and a new life - these were the gifts she had left him. -- Milan Kundera
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. -- Milan Kundera
Youth is a terrible thing: it is a stage trod by children in buskins and fancy costumes mouthing speeches they've memorized and fanatically believe but only half understand -- Milan Kundera
When a woman doesn't live sufficiently through her body, she comes to see the body as an enemy. -- Milan Kundera
Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. -- Milan Kundera
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. -- Milan Kundera
The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on. -- Milan Kundera
Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn't expect much from her re-unions. -- Milan Kundera
It is the sex of the novels and not that of their authors that must interest us. All great novels, all true novels are bisexual. This is to say that they express both a feminine and a masculine vision of the world. The sex of the authors as physical people is their private affair. -- Milan Kundera
Sabina was now by herself. She went back to the mirror, still in her underwear. She put the bowler hat back on her head and had a long look at herself. She was amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment. -- Milan Kundera
There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being -- Milan Kundera
Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly. -- Milan Kundera
All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests ... -- Milan Kundera
Speak truth to power. -- Milan Kundera
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. -- Milan Kundera
The only person who had ever really interrogated her was her husband, and that was because love is a constant interrogation. -- Milan Kundera
Isn't that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an 'incoherent succession of images'? -- Milan Kundera
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? -- Milan Kundera
They talk on about death, about boredom, they drink wine, they laugh, they have a good time, they are happy. -- Milan Kundera
It is much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground," he said, "than to send petitions to a president. -- Milan Kundera
Insofar as it is possible to divide people in categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity.Every Frenchman is different. But all actors are similar. -- Milan Kundera
Nothing yet. I've been waiting."
"for what?"
she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him. -- Milan Kundera
She desired her own body, newly discovered, intimate and alien beyond all others, incomparably exciting. -- Milan Kundera
Beauty is a rebellion against time. -- Milan Kundera
I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative. -- Milan Kundera
Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms . -- Milan Kundera
He realized that the path of love, which Bertlef had suggested, was closed to him; it was the path of saints, not of ordinary men. -- Milan Kundera
Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom; even in a game is a trap for the players. -- Milan Kundera
Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the non-thought of received ideas. -- Milan Kundera
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order. -- Milan Kundera
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. -- Milan Kundera
There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless. -- Milan Kundera
Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool? -- Milan Kundera
When the north pole comes so close as to touch the south pole, the earth disappears and man finds himself in a void that makes his head spin and beckons him to fall. -- Milan Kundera
I never forgot that, because, though I was only a child, something seemed to become clear to me: this is existence as such confronting time as such; and that confrontation, I understood, is named boredom. -- Milan Kundera
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. -- Milan Kundera
How she wished she could learn lightness! -- Milan Kundera
Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten. -- Milan Kundera
But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!"
"So can we," the corpses laughed. -- Milan Kundera
Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her. -- Milan Kundera
She felt happy in Paris, happier than here, but only Prague held her by a secret bond of beauty. -- Milan Kundera
Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden. -- Milan Kundera
Laughter was like an enormous trap waiting patiently in the room with them; but hidden behind a thin wall. -- Milan Kundera
It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. -- Milan Kundera
But the larger a man grows in his own inner darkness, the more his outer form diminishes. -- Milan Kundera
Not only have people stopped trying to be attractive when they are out among other people, but they are no longer even trying not to look ugly! -- Milan Kundera
The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled. -- Milan Kundera
Her life was split. Both day and night were competing for her. -- Milan Kundera
What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure. -- Milan Kundera
What I need most of all is certainty. -- Milan Kundera
She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive. -- Milan Kundera
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to demand-free and asking but his company. -- Milan Kundera
No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad. -- Milan Kundera
It is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities" -- Pretty Wittgenstein like. -- Milan Kundera
On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth. -- Milan Kundera
The moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. -- Milan Kundera
He considered music a liberating force: it liberated him from loneliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of his body and allowed his soul to step out into the world and make friends. -- Milan Kundera
Misery and pride. 'On horseback, death and a peacock'. -- Milan Kundera
Oh lovers! be careful in those dangerous first days! once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal. -- Milan Kundera
Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches. -- Milan Kundera
The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul. -- Milan Kundera
What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times a thought can be refuted, yes, but not retracted. (p. 179) -- Milan Kundera
In the sunet of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia. -- Milan Kundera
Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. -- Milan Kundera
Internal imperatives are all the more powerful and therefore all the more of an inducement to revolt. -- Milan Kundera
Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child. -- Milan Kundera
Franz could not accept that the fact that the glory of the Grand March was equal to the comic vanity of its marchers. -- Milan Kundera
He had come to find out that reality was more than a dream, much more than a dream! -- Milan Kundera
The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise. -- Milan Kundera
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other. -- Milan Kundera
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation. -- Milan Kundera
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. -- Milan Kundera
A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead. -- Milan Kundera
I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30) -- Milan Kundera
It was idealism that made him so angry. He expected too much out of life. -- Milan Kundera
Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32) -- Milan Kundera
Not every woman was worthy of being called a woman. -- Milan Kundera
Whoever wishes to remember must not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge. -- Milan Kundera
By writing books, a man turns into a universe. -- Milan Kundera
He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward. -- Milan Kundera
Love is a constant interrogation. -- Milan Kundera
That is the secret of poetry. We burn in the woman we adore, we burn in the thought we espouse, we burn in the landscape that moves us -- Milan Kundera
The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme. -- Milan Kundera
Art must always stand guard against stirring emotions that lie outside the aesthetic: sexual arousal, terror, disgust, shock. -- Milan Kundera
If excitement is a mechanism our Creator uses for His own amusement, love is something that belongs to us alone and enables us to flee the Creator. Love is our freedom. Love lies beyond Es Muss sein! -- Milan Kundera
Everything he did, he did for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it done. -- Milan Kundera
Love is poetry, poetry is love -- Milan Kundera
(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations. -- Milan Kundera
A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated. -- Milan Kundera
All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual. -- Milan Kundera
But no carnival can go on for ever. -- Milan Kundera
The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia. -- Milan Kundera
Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments. -- Milan Kundera
Is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? -- Milan Kundera
In languages that derive from Latin "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer -- Milan Kundera
The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel. -- Milan Kundera
Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind. -- Milan Kundera
Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes! -- Milan Kundera
We wanted to destroy the world. With our messianism we nearly destroyed it. Maybe they with their selfishness will save it. -- Milan Kundera
God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads. -- Milan Kundera
Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
Love is a battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting." And he left. -- Milan Kundera
He felt responsible for his fate, but his fate felt no responsibility for him. -- Milan Kundera
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought. -- Milan Kundera
Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent, -- Milan Kundera
The greatest adventure of our lives is the absence of adventure. -- Milan Kundera
When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway. -- Milan Kundera
He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them from trembling. -- Milan Kundera
The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone -- Milan Kundera
In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. -- Milan Kundera
dictionary with unsaid words -- Milan Kundera
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. -- Milan Kundera
But the longer a man grows in his own darkness, the more his outer form diminishes
pg 95 -- Milan Kundera
When she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague. -- Milan Kundera