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fd3a65b
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Hss `shq hmh m r dchr yn twhm gmrhkhnndh myszd khh Trf khwd r myshnsym.
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Milan Kundera |
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07a3b1e
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If you don't care about the destination, you don't ask where you're going.
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Milan Kundera |
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ac7339c
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fkar twms :n mDj`@ mr'@ wlnwm m`h rGbtn lyst mkhtlftyn fHsb bl mtnqDtyn 'yD.flHb l ytjl~ blrGb@ f~ mmrs@ ljns (whdhh lrGb@ tnTbq `l~ `dd l yHS~ mn lns) wlkn blrGb@ f~ lnwm lmshtrk (whdhh lrGb@ l tkhS l mr'@ wHd@).
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Milan Kundera |
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c4121fb
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Zl yqlb fy r'sh bsrwr w Hnyn fkr@ llh w hw shbh wthq b'n llh Gyr mwjwd
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Milan Kundera |
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811108a
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In my opinion, Jan is mistaken in thinking that the border is a line that crosses a man's life at a specific point, that it marks a break in time, a particular second on the clock of a human life. No. I am certain, on the contrary, that the border is constantly with us, irrespective of time and our stage of life, that it is omnipresent, even though circumstances might make it more or less visible. The woman Jan had loved most was right to s..
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Milan Kundera |
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f2adbdc
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They were ready to sell people a future in exchange for their past... They wanted to compel him to cast his life away and become a shadow, a man without past, an actor without a role, and turn even his castaway life, even the role the actor had abandoned, into a shadow. Having turned him into a shadow, they would let him live.
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past
shadow
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Milan Kundera |
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0e2e396
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He looks at Mama out of the corner of his eye, again surprised by how little she is. As if all of her life has been a slow process of shrinkage. But just what is that shrinkage? Is it the real shrinkage of a person abandoning his adult dimensions and starting on the long journey through old age and death toward distances where there is only a nothingness without dimension?
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Milan Kundera |
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3e95cf7
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kl lwjwh knt Hqyqy@ lm ykn ly , `l~ Grr lmnfqyn wjh Hqyqy w'khr~ zy'f@ ,kn ldy `d@ wjwh l'ny knt ftyan wlm 'kn 'n nfsy , '`rf mn 'kwn wmn 'ryd 'n 'kwnh lymn` dhlk mn 'n `dm ltnsb lmwjwd byn kl hdhh lwjwh kn ykhlq ldy lwjl ,lm 'kn 'Tbq 'yan mnh tmman, wknt 'tHrk wrh bbld@ bshkl '`m~.
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Milan Kundera |
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3c2af6e
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Insan hicbir seyi, hicbir kimseyi ciddiye alamayinca yasamak ne kadar da huzun verici!
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Milan Kundera |
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96fc6e3
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The entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout 'We are all writers!' For everyone is pained with the thought of disappearing, unheard, and unseen into an indifferent universe and because of that, everyone wants, wither there's still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
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Milan Kundera |
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3df3960
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.
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hatred
war
obscenity
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Milan Kundera |
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ec10632
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Even a life of suffering has a mysterious value. Even a life on the threshold of death is a thing of splendor. Anyone who has not looked death in the face does not know this, but I know it ...
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Milan Kundera |
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8ba2502
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isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? the potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? the drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
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sincerity
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Milan Kundera |
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cbf6c22
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A young woman forced to keep drunks supplied with beer and siblings with clean underwear -instead of being allowed to pursue "something higher"- stores up great reserves of vitality, a vitality never dreamed of by university students yawning over their books."
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vitality
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Milan Kundera |
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5ceaff9
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Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test: every one of them has raised his hand in the same way my former friends and colleagues (willingly or not, out of conviction or fear) raised theirs. You must admit: it's hard to live with people w..
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Milan Kundera |
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4fdac07
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When a person is clubbed violently on the head, he collapses and stops breathing. Some day, he will stop breathing anyway.
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Milan Kundera |
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6882db5
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God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.
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Milan Kundera |
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b2f1c27
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perhaps all the questions we ask for love, to measure, test, prob, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short. Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved. that is, we demand something (love) from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company
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Milan Kundera |
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e1e961d
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Epic art is founded on action, and the model of a society in which action could play out in greatest freedom was that of the heroic Greek period; so said Hegel, and he demonstrated it with The Iliad: even though Agamemnon was the prime king, other kings and princes chose freely to join him and, like Achilles, they were free to withdraw from the battle. Similarly the people joined with their princes of their own free will; there was no law t..
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classical
statism
bureaucracy
doing
hegel
iliad
ancient
homer
greece
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Milan Kundera |
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2fa20f9
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And I loved her so much I couldn't conceive of ever parting from her; true, we never talked about marriage, but at least was asbolutely serious about marrying her one day
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Milan Kundera |
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4376689
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twm b khwd mygft khh ay mydnstnd y nmydnstnd, msy'lh ssy nyst, blkhh byd prsyd: gr bykhbr bshym, bygnh hstym? ay adm blhy khh br rykhh qdrt tkhyh zdh st, tnh bh `dhr jhlt, z hrgwnh msy'wlyty mbrst?
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Milan Kundera |
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85521f2
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The only thing that makes me somewhat sceptical regarding human procreation is the unintelligent selection of parents. Some of the most unattractive individuals in the world feel they must multiply at all costs. They are apparently under the illusion that the burden of ugliness becomes lighter if it is shared with descendants.
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Milan Kundera |
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3e0e0dc
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in private, a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language, acts silly, tells dirty jokes, repeats himself, makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public, and so forth. Of course, we all act like Prochazka, in private we bad-mouth our friends and use coarse language; that we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experie..
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Milan Kundera |
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54c47ae
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When I described Madame de T's night, I recalled the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. From that equation we can deduce various corrollaries, for instance this one: our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. Now I would reverse that statement ..
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Milan Kundera |
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368db76
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Now we are longtime outcasts, flying through the emptiness of time in a straight line. Yet somewhere deep down a thin thread still ties us to that far-off misty Paradise, where Adam leans over a well and, unlike Narcissus, never even suspects that the pale yellow blotch appearing in it is he himself. The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.
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Milan Kundera |
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90499fb
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Necessity knows no magic formuae--they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.
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Milan Kundera |
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01496a1
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For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves not others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy..
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truth
public
private
privacy
secrets
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Milan Kundera |
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a4f6351
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People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability of suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror, and nothing but horror.
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nature
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Milan Kundera |
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18fd69c
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Darkness attracted him as much as light. He knew that these days turning out the light before making love was considered laughable, and so he always left a small lamp burning over the bed. At the momemnt he penetrated sabina, however, he closed his eyes. The pleasure suffusing his body called for darkness. The darkness was pure, perfect, thoughtless, vision less; that darkness was without end, without borders; that darkness was the infinite..
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Milan Kundera |
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943c334
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Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
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Milan Kundera |
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b2db060
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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literature
stupidity
philosophy
czech-literature
foolishness
questions
novel
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Milan Kundera |
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207de4f
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I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother's, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player's arm movement.
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Milan Kundera |
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3a75e47
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Love is a battle" she said smiling, "And I plan on going fighting 'til the end." "Love is a battle? well, I don't feel at all like fighting," and he left."
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milan kundera |
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8ec351e
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First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life.
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Milan Kundera |
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1b6f681
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He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.
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existence
mortality
non-existence
non-fiction
essay
impermanence
oblivion
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Milan Kundera |
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ab0fb92
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Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.
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Milan Kundera |
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ffca6c8
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The consciousness of my own baseness has done nothing to reconcile me to the baseness of others. Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another. I have no desire for that slimy brotherhood.
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Milan Kundera |
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6a8e381
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Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
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Milan Kundera |
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970bdc3
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Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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Milan Kundera |
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3f8ce65
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The novel is the fruit of a human illusion. The illusion of the power to understand others. But what do we know of one another?
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Milan Kundera |
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abaa76b
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.
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Milan Kundera |
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318e132
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the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. the absolute of a burden causes man to be lighter than air.
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Milan Kundera |
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94d1a08
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In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster
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Milan Kundera |
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0cfab8d
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we live everything as it comes, without warning , like an actor going on cold. and what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? that is why life is always like a sketch. No , "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground for nothing, an outline with no picture"
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Milan Kundera |