Quotes from Milan Kundera

How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

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.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women, Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say. The only things she said when he released her from his embrace was, 'You don't know how happy I am to be with you.' That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.

Love begins with a metaphor. Love begins at a point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

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.

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest if burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemeteries...When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby.

AÅŸk? ölçmek, s?namak, denemek ve kurtarmak için aÅŸka yönelttiÄŸimiz bütün bu sorular belki de her ÅŸeyin yan?s?ra aÅŸk? k?saltmaya da yar?yor. Belki de sevemememizin nedeni çok sevmek istememiz, yani kar??m?zdaki kiÅŸiden hiçbir istekte bulunmaks?z?n, ondan onunla birlikte olmaktan baÅŸka bir ÅŸey istemeksizin kendimizi ona verecek yerde ondan bir ÅŸey (aÅŸk) talep etmemizdir.

The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.

The only explanation I can suggest is that for Franz, love was not an extension of public life but its antithesis. It meant a longing to put himself in the mercy of his partner. He who gives himself up his weapons as well. And deprived in advance of defense against a possible blow, he cannot help wondering when the blow will fall. That is why I can say that for Franz, love meant the constant expectation of a blow.

Allí donde habla el corazón es de mala educación que la razón lo contradiga

And he reflected that one cannot completely become his own self until one is completely among others.

He felt responsible for his fate, but his fate felt no responsibility for him.

Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism in art and in politics is a veiled longing for death.

Nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.

They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

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.

Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections.

Fare l'amore con una donna e dormire con una donna sono due passioni non solo diverse, ma quasi opposte. L'amore non si manifesta con il desiderio di fare l'amore [...] ma col desiderio di dormire insieme.

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.

The man of fantasy must become the man of action, the adventure of dreams the adventure of life.

A person finds it distasteful to hear his life recounted with a different interpretation from his own.