Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 16

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But deep down she said to herself, Franz maybe strong, but his strength is directed outward; when it comes to the people he lives with, the people he's loves, he's weak. Franz's weakness is called goodness. Franz would never give Sabina orders. He would never command her, as Tomas had, to lay the mirror on the floor and walk back and forth on it naked. Not that he lacks sensuality; he simply lacks the strength to give orders. There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Milan Kundera

Strong, Love Is, Mirrors

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

Milan Kundera

Children, Moving, Infancy

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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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"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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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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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

Milan Kundera

Men, Mysterious, Coincidence

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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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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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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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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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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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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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He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.

Milan Kundera

Lying, Bed, Former Life

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

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

Milan Kundera

Childhood, Path, Steps

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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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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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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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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.

Milan Kundera

Soul, Unity, Age

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For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to 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.

Milan Kundera

Lying, Mean, Eye

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

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Born: April 1, 1929
Occupation: Writer
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