Quotes from Milan Kundera

Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.

She had always taken it as a given that emigrating was a misfortune. But, now she wonders, wasn't it instead an illusion of misfortune, an illusion suggested by the way people perceive an émigré? Wasn't she interpreting her own life according to the operating instructions other people had handed her? And she thought that even though it had been imposed from the outside and against her will, her emigration was perhaps, without her knowing it, the best outcome for her life.

?ovjek i ne znaju?i komponira svoj život prema zakonima ljepote i u trenutcima najdubljeg bezna?a.

Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential.

The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, patterns, models— those that are in fashion, that suit, that please—and enact them.

Cada possibilidade nova que tem a existência, até a menos provável, transforma a existência inteira.

through the magical power of a dress she could see herself imprisoned in a life she did not want and would never again be able to leave. As if long ago, at the start of her adult life, she had had a choice among several possible lives and had ended up choosing the one that took her to France. And as if those other lives, rejected and abandoned, were still lying in wait for her and were jealously watching for her from their lairs.

Con ello no quiero decir que haya dejado de amarla, que la haya olvidado, que su recuero haya empalidecido; al contrario; permanece dentro de mí constantemente como una callada nostalgia; la anhelo como se anhela algo que se ha perdido definitivamente.

Si las personas sólo fueran responsables de lo que hacen conscientemente, los idiotas estarían de antemano libres de cualquier culpa

Actually, he had always preferred the unreal to the real.

She pictures his jovial figure, dressed up in his T-short, shouting that Kafka was born in Prague, and she feels a desire rising through her body, the irrepressible desire to take a lover. Not to patch up her life as it is. But to turn it completely upside down. Finally take possession of her own fate.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements, which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of the return still pertinent to our time?

What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion.

He reflected that he had only one life and that he wanted to live it somewhere else.

Sabina was now by herself. She went back to the mirror, still in her underwear. She put the bowler hat back on her head and had a long look at herself. She was amazed at the number of years she had spent pursuing one lost moment.

his [Mayakovsky] genius was as indispensable to the Russian Revolution as Dzherzhinsky's police. Lyricism, lyricization, lyrical talk, lyrical enthusiasm are an integrating part of what is called the totalitarian world; that world is not the gulag as such; it's a gulag that has poems plastering its outside walls and people dancing before them.

Indeed, all he remembers are situations that make him displeased with himself.

I might put it another way: Franz felt his book life to be unreal. He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts. It never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival- in other words, a dream.

humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. and nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.

She surrendered her body to the judgment of someone else's eyes- and that was a source of anxious uncertainty.

It is always nice to dream that we are part of a jubilant throng marching through the centuries...

gülmek, derinlemesine yaÅŸamakt?r.

She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive.