Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 16

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• Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.

  Milan Kundera

  Sleep, Gone, Nightmare

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• The day after his father left, Franz and his mother went into town together, and as they left home Franz noticed that her shoes did not match. He was in a quandary: he wanted to point out the mistake, but was afraid he would hurt her. So, during the two hours they spent walking through the city together he kept his eyes focused on her feet. It was then he had his first inkling of what it means to suffer.

  Milan Kundera

  Mother, Hurt, Father

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• She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.

  Milan Kundera

  Body, Passionate, Surface

  Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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• Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.

  Milan Kundera

  Women, Events, Action

  Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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• The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.' 'Do I look like a liar?' 'You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women.

  Milan Kundera

  Girl, Liars, Lying

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• Jealousy isn't a pleasant quality, but if it isn't overdone (and if it's combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there's even something touching about it.

  Milan Kundera

  Jealousy, Touching, Quality

  Milan Kundera (1974). “Laughable Loves”

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• This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at 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.

  Milan Kundera

  Fashion, Reading, May

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• I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Escaping, Understood

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• But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

  Milan Kundera

  Real, Men, Faces

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• He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

  Milan Kundera

  Book, Ideas, People

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• Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Parody, Eternal

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• There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Violence, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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• Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Air, Important

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• Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

  Milan Kundera

  Giving, Unity, Splinters

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• Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

  Milan Kundera

  Laughter, Men, Hands

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• Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Enemy, World

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• The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

  Milan Kundera

  Horse, Men, Order

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• In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.

  Milan Kundera

  Dance, Partners

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• Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

  Milan Kundera

  Beauty, Art, Matter

  "James Joyce, the Citizen and the Artist". Book by Charles Peake, 1977.

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• Aesthetic racism is almost always a sign of inexperience. Those who have not made their way far enough into the world of amorous delights judge women only by what can be seen. But those who really know women understand that the eye reveals only a minute fraction of what a woman can offer us. When God bade mankind be fruitful and multiply, Doctor, He was thinking of the ugly as well as of the beautiful. I am convinced I might add, that the aesthetic criterion does not come from God but from the devil. In paradise no distinction was made between ugliness and beauty.

  Milan Kundera

  Beautiful, Eye, Thinking

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• Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives,
  but they think they know all about Stendhal's or Faulkner's.

  Milan Kundera

  Marriage, Sex, Thinking

  "Revenge of the pygmies" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. June 24, 2000.

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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 . . .

  Milan Kundera

  Children, Race, Generations

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• A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

  Milan Kundera

  Doe, Ethics, Morality

  New York Review of Books, July 19, 1984.

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• How goodness heightens beauty!

  Milan Kundera

  Beauty, Body Image, Goodness

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• The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

  Milan Kundera

  Attitude, Tolerance, World

  "Siraaj: An Arab Tale". Book by Radwa Ashour, 2007.

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