Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 14

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This was exactly what the girl had most dreaded all her life and had scrupulously avoided until now: lovemaking without emotion or love. She knew that she had crossed the forbidden boundary, but she proceeded across it without objections and as a full participant; only somewhere, far off in a corner of her consciousness, did she feel horror at the thought that she had never known such pleasure, never so much pleasure as at this moment--beyond that boundary.

Milan Kundera

Girl, Emotion, Consciousness

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In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

Milan Kundera

Memories, Writing, Play

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The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen

Milan Kundera

Character, Self, Numbers

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There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to the very last, the most important one, at this point a man must halt and stand firm if he doesn't want to begin life all over again with idle hands and a feeling of being shipwrecked.

Milan Kundera

Men, Hands, Order

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Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten.

Milan Kundera

Beautiful, Dream, Lying

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His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.

Milan Kundera

Medicine, People, Desire

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I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

Milan Kundera

Laughter, Book, Angel

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In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.

Milan Kundera

Cutting, Feet, Air

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Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: "Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.

Milan Kundera

Choices, Feelings, Individuality

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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

Milan Kundera

Dog, Love Is, Men

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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

Milan Kundera

Sadness, Way, Kind

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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Milan Kundera

Degrees, Doe, Coincidence

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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.

Milan Kundera

History, Reign, Ends

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The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Milan Kundera

Courage, Character, Discovery

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A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations

Milan Kundera

Expression, Creating, Individuality

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The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

Milan Kundera

Writing, Play, Doe

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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Milan Kundera

Men, Light, Discovery

The Guardian, June 3, 1988.

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If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures.

Milan Kundera

People, Doubt, World

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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Milan Kundera

Kitsch, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Existence

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, (Part Six: The Grand March), 1984.

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Dogs are our link to paradise.

Milan Kundera

Dog, Pet, Links

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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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 generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.

Milan Kundera

Art, Children, Race

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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.

Milan Kundera

Children, Love Is, Essence

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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Milan Kundera

Vocabulary, Together, Too Late

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In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

Milan Kundera

Book, Eye, Brotherhood

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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

Milan Kundera

Moments, Posthumous

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Born: April 1, 1929
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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