Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 15

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

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Eye, Brotherhood

  4 Copy quote

• 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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• But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Self, Hysteria

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• Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.

  Milan Kundera

  Believe, Fall, Sleep

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• Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)

  Milan Kundera

  Artist, Roles, World

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• She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.

  Milan Kundera

  Sadness, Men, Soothing

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• The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

  Milan Kundera

  Soul, Body, Cages

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• She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women

  Milan Kundera

  Mother, Unique, Naked

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• She knew, of course that she was being supremely unfair, that Franz was the best man she ever had- he was intelligent, he understood her paintings, he was handsome and good-but the more she thought about it, the more she longed to ravish his intelligence, defile his kindheartedness, and violate his powerless strength

  Milan Kundera

  Intelligent, Men, Handsome

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• When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

  Milan Kundera

  Kissing, Avid, Events

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• "Pick me up," is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.

  Milan Kundera

  Fall, Pick Me Up, Messages

  "Unbearable Lightness Of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, archive.org. 1984.

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• For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.

  Milan Kundera

  Flames, Essence, Body

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• To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

  Milan Kundera

  Believe, Adults, Doe

  "Ignorance". Book by Milan Kundera, 2000.

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• A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Religious, Sight, Essence

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• What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

  Milan Kundera

  Character, Essence, Dumb

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• The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.

  Milan Kundera

  Childhood, Path, Steps

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• Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Moving, Infancy

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• How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Sight, Soul

  "Light but sound" by John Banville, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2004.

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• At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

  Milan Kundera

  Morning, Moving, Adventure

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• Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

  Milan Kundera

  Three, Weight, Heavy

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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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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• Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

  Milan Kundera

  Sides, Uniforms, Nudity

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• The best actors do not let the wheels show.

  Milan Kundera

  Funny, Humorous, Acting

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• By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.

  Milan Kundera

  Mirrors, Names, Giving

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• We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Light, Hands

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