Milan Kundera
Franco-Czech novelist born in Brno, Moravia, now the Czech Republic.
As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go.
The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.
Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.
In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
"Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
"Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.
Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.