Milan Kundera Quotes

384 quotes in 4625 categories

• Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1)…
• Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
• I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty…
• You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every…
• For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women.…
• Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
• To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and…
• The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as…
• In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.
• High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of…
• Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what…
• In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise,…
• Every change of scene requires new expositions, descriptions, explanations.
• Broch is an inspiration to us, not only because of what he accomplished, but also because of all that he aimed at and could not…
• I am incapable of speaking of myself and of my life and the states of my soul, I am discreet to an almost pathological degree,…
• There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.
• Love is basically like leaches .... They suck until they cant get enough of you. Until you find a catapillar that will turn into the…
• A wave of anger washed over me, anger against myself, at my age at the time, that stupid lyrically age, when a man is too…
• Nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return
• This is the image from which he was born...... Characters are not born, like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence,…

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