Milan Kundera
Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Moravia, now the Czech Republic.
"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
We can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.
Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
The fact that until recently the word “shit” appeared in print as s— has nothing to do with moral considerations. You can’t claim that shit is immoral, after all! The objection to shit is a metaphysical one. The daily defecation session is daily proof of the unacceptability of Creation. … The aesthetic ideal of the categorical agreement with being is a world in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist. This aesthetic ideal is called kitsch. … Kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým.
No love can survive muteness.
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.
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.
How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?
Sabina’s initial inner revolt against Communism was aesthetic rather than ethical in character. What repelled her was not nearly so much the ugliness of the Communist world (ruined castles transformed into cow sheds) as the mask of beauty it tried to wear — in other words, Communist kitsch.
Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.
She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place."