Quotes from 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.

the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. the absolute of a burden causes man to be lighter than air.

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? that is why life is always like a sketch. No , sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground for nothing, an outline with no picture

Is a fool on the throne relieved of all responsibility merely because he is a fool?

Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the momemnt he penetrated sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, vision less; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite we each carry within us.

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.

The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes.

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 ...

Kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality; the artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

The characters in my novels are my own unrealized 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.

Sometimes (more in sport than from real concern) I defended myself against the charge of individualism and demanded from the others proof that I was an individualist. For want of concrete evidence they would say: " It´s the way you behave." "How do I behave?" "You have a strange kind of smile". "And If I do? That´s how I express my joy." "No, your smile is though you were thinking to yourself.

And Jakub realized that this child had done no harm, that he was not guilty of anything, and yet had been born with bad eyes and would have them forever. And he reflected further that what he had held against others was something given, something they came into the world with and carried with them like a heavy wire fence. He reflected that he had no privileged right to high-mindedness and that the highest degree of high-mindedness is to love people even though they are murderers.

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.

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.

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.

But was it love? 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?

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.

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty. If we cannot change the world, let's at least change our lives and live them freely.

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?

His connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. It is an inviolable right of a novelist to rework his novel. If the opening does not please him, he can rewrite or delete it. But Zdena's existence denied Mirek that author's prerogative. Zdena insisted on remaining on the opening pages of the novel and did not let herself be crossed out.

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)

Tamina feels that the eyes of a single outsider are enough to destroy the worth of her personal diaries, while Goethe thinks that if a single individual fails to set eyes on his lines, that individual calls his–Goethe's–entire existence into question. The difference between Tamina and Goethe is the difference between human being and writer.

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.

If it were possible to raise the penis by means of a simple command, then sexual excitement would have no place in the world.