Quotes from 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

he tried to design his life in such a way that no woman could move in with a suitcase

Indeed, the only truely serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truely serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set limits, describes the boundaries of human exsistence.

Even though man himself is mortal, he can imagine neither the end of space nor of time nor of history nor of a people, for he always lives in an illusory infinitude. Those who are fascinated by the idea of progress do not suspect that everything moving forward is at the same time bringing the end nearer and that joyous watchwords like 'forward' and 'farther' are the lascivious voice of death urging us to hasten to it.

The reign of imagology begins where history ends

To be absolutely modern is to be the ally of one's grave diggers.

What we have not chosen we cannot consider our merit or our failure.

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.

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?

What he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-powering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!

I have said before that metaphors are dangerous. 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.

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.

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.

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

Love is a battle she said smiling, And I plan on going fighting 'til the end. Love is a battle? well, I don't feel at all like fighting, and he left.

not even one's own pain weigh so heavy as the pain one feels with someone , for someone

La insignificancia, amigo mío, es la esencia de la existencia.

Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of Man.

You know, it's really very peculiar. 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.

extremes mean borders beyond which life ends…and a passion for extremism is a veiled longing for death.

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.

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.

There is no perfection only life Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being

don't be scared, don't be scared, you won't feel any pain there, you'll dream of squirrels abd rabbits, you'll have cows there, and Mefisto will be there, don't be scared...