Milan Kundera
Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Moravia, now the Czech Republic.
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
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.
"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
No love can survive muteness.
Žádné pocínání není samo o sobe dohré ani zlé. Teprve jeho místo v rádu ciní je dobrým ci zlým.
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.
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.
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia.
What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.
He had spent seven years of his life with Tereza, and now he realised that those years were more attractive in retrospect than they were when he was living them.
Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.
Early in the novel [Anna Karenina], Anna meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition — the same motif appears at the beginning and the end — may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. … 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.
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.