Quotes from Milan Kundera

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

Here he was, doing things he didn't care a damn about, and enjoying it.

For it is clear immediately: human life as such is a defeat. All we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it. That - that is the raison d'être of the art of the novel.

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced that they had discovered the road to paradise.

El amor no se manifiesta con el deseo de acostarse con alguien... Sino con el deseo de dormir junto a alguien.

No one cares about the artist Kafka, who troubles us with his puzzling aesthetic, because we'd rather have Kafka as the fusion of experience and work, the Kafka who had a difficult relationship with his father and didn't know how to deal with women.

Todos consideramos impensable que el amor de nuestra vida pueda ser algo leve, sin peso; creemos que nuestro amor es algo que tenía que ser; que sin él nuestra vida no sería nuestra vida. Nos parece que el propio huraño Beethoven, con su terrible melena, toca para nuestro gran amor su «es muss sein!».

After Chopin's death, Polish patriots cut up his body to take out his heart. They nationalized this poor muscle and buried it in Poland. A dead person is treated either as trash or as a symbol. Either way, it's the same disrespect to his vanished individuality.

And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their meaning lost, they turned into trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.

He goes on reading, and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under Josef's name?

Os extremos delimitam a fronteira para além da qual a vida termina, e a paixão pelo extremismo, tanto em arte como em política, é um desejo de morte disfarçado.

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.

The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven's one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.

And in fact, Soviet films, which flooded the cinemas of all Communist countries in that cruelest of times, were saturated with incredible innocence and chastity. The greatest conflict tat could occur between two Russians was a lovers' misunderstanding: he thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her. But in the final scene they would fall into each others' arms, tears of happiness trickling down their cheeks.

Staring at herself for long stretches of time, she was occa­sionally upset at the sight of her mother's features in her face. She would stare all the more doggedly at her image in an attempt to wish them away and keep only what was hers alone. Each time she succeeded was a time of intoxication: her soul would rise to the surface of her body like a crew charging up from the bowels of a ship, spreading out over the deck, waving at the sky and singing in jubilation.

DüÅŸüncenin yakla??kl??? ile gerçeÄŸin kesinliÄŸi aras?nda düÅŸlenemez olan?n yaratt??? küçük bir boÅŸluk vard? ve onun bir türlü peÅŸini b?rakmayan da bu boÅŸluktu.

He was on a quest for sensations he had never experienced, did not understand; he was looking for them in his partner (on the watch for each little emotion her face might reflect), he looked for them in himself (for interminable hours of introspection)

Anyone who decides to leave his country forever has to resign himself never to see his family again.

To cover his tracks and mask his erotic withdrawal, he took pleasure in good-naturedly dirty stories and mildly ambiguous allusions, all delivered loudly and with laughter. The mother was his best ally, ever quick to support him with smutty remarks that she would pronounce in some exaggerated, parodic manner, and in her puerile English. Listening to the two of them, Irena got the sense that eroticism had once and for all turned into childish clowning.

Hiçbir tehlike olmamas?na raÄŸmen, hayat?ndaki bir an?n diÄŸer bütün anlar gibi hiçliÄŸe dönüÅŸecek yerde zaman?n ak???ndan kopar?laca??n? ve gün gelip aptalca bir rastlant?n?n sonucunda iyi gömülmemiÅŸ bir ceset gibi canland?r?laca??n? düÅŸünerek belli bir s?k?nt? duymaktan alam?yordu kendini.

Komünistler kapitalizmin evriminin proletaryay? gitgide yoksullaÅŸt?raca??na inanm??lard?, günün birinde Avrupa'n?n bütün iÅŸçilerinin iÅŸlerine arabayla gittiÄŸini keÅŸfedince, gerçeÄŸin hile yapt???n? hayk?rmak arzusuna kap?lm??lard?r. Gerçek, ideolojiden daha güçlüydü.

Genij lirike je genij neiskustva. Pjesnik ne zna mnogo o svijetu, ali rije?i koje teku iz njega svrstavaju se u prekrasne skupine, kona?ne kao kristal. Pjesnik je nezreo ?ovjek, ali njegov stih nosi u sebi mo? proro?anstva pred kojim i sam ostaje zapanjen.

Dios les dio a los hombres la libertad y por eso podemos suponer que al fin y al cabo no es responsable de los crímenes humanos. Pero el único responsable de la mierda es aquel que creó al hombre.

Quien se entrega a otro como un soldado que se rinde, debe hacer previamente entrega de cualquier tipo de arma. Y si se queda sin defensa alguna ante un ataque, no podrá evitar preguntarse: ¿Cuándo llegará el ataque? Por eso puedo decir. Para Franz el amor significaba la permanente espera de un ataque.