Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
• This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only…
• Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination,…
• His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner…
• When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has…
• 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…
• The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.…
• In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off…
• Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: "Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your…
• From the top of the staircase she sees the London train, modern and elegant, and she tells herself again: Whether it's good luck or bad…
• The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
• I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
• Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of…
• ...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
• I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
• But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
• ...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for…
• Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are…
• We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from the previous one. We leave…
• Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would…

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