Quotes from Milan Kundera

A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

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?

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.

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.

I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive.

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.

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil.

los amores son como los imperios: cuando desaparece la idea sobre la cual han sido construidos, perecen ellos también.

a man possessed with peace is always smiling

If he invited her to come, then come she would, and offer him up her life.

Perhaps I love you. Perhaps I love you very much. But probably just for this reason it would be better if we remain as we are. I think a man and a woman love each other all the more when they don't live together and when they know about each other only that they exist, and when they are grateful to each other for the fact that they exist and that they know they exist. And that alone is enough for their happiness.

Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion.

Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

To be mortal is the most basic human experience and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.

And suddenly something unforgettable occurred: suddenly she felt a desire to go to him and hear his voice, his words. If he spoke to her in a soft, deep voice her soul would take courage and rise to the surface of her body, and she would burst our crying. She would put her arms around him the way she had put her arms around the chestnut tree's thick trunk in her dream.

a man who loses his privacy loses everything...a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster

Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it's too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didn't know a thing.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

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.

The constitution did indeed guarantee freedom of speech, but the laws punished anything that could be considered an attack on state security

A scarf from her dress works free and floats behind her the way memories float behind the dead.

A person's destiny often ends before his death.

El hombre nunca puede saber qué debe querer, porque vive sólo una vida y no tiene modo de compararla con sus vidas precedentes ni de enmendarla en sus vidas posteriores.