Milan Kundera quotes - page 7

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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Milan Kundera
The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic. View quote
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. View quote
Milan Kundera
But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33) View quote
Milan Kundera
Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death. View quote
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. View quote
Milan Kundera
If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him. View quote
Milan Kundera
Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines. (Milan Kundera)
Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being. View quote
Milan Kundera
Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
Milan Kundera
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. View quote
Milan Kundera
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero? View quote
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. View quote
Milan Kundera
He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. View quote
Milan Kundera
I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30) View quote
Milan Kundera
No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. (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. View quote
Milan Kundera
She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place." View quote
Milan Kundera
We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse. View quote
Milan Kundera
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them. View quote
Milan Kundera