Milan Kundera

“He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.”

“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.”

“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. ”

“The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.”

“[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.”

“Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.”

“Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)”

“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)”

“[M]an has always harbored the desire to rewrite his own biography, to change the past, to wipe out tracks, both his own and other's. (p.130)”

“He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them from trembling.”

“Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either to our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume to correct attitude to her unchosen faith. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as taking pride in it.”

“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.”

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

“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?”

“I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.”

“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.”

“When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?”

“Es muss sein. Es muss sein.”

“A novel does not assert anything, a novel poses questions... The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.”

“Jika ingin menghancurkan sebuah bangsa dan peradaban, hancurkan buku-bukunya; maka pastilah bangsa itu akan musnah.”

“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”

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

“Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight. ”

“Let us define our terms. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac, she is simply a woman in love. But my friend who xeroxes his love letters so he can publish them someday--my friend is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one's immediate family); it is a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). In this sense the taxi driver and Goethe share the same passion. What distinguishes Goethe from the taxi driver is the result of the passion, not the passion itself."Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi [character from the book] was absolutely right when she claimed never to have experienced anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the moter driving her to write)."But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.”

“Adventure, the first great theme of the novel.”

“All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

“The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future.”

“When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?”

“As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”

“Metaphors are dangerous, Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

“What he did succeed in seeing behind him in his mind's eye was tiny, compressed like a closed accordion.”

“Human life occurs only once, and the reason we cannot determine which of our decisions are good and which bad is that in a given situation we can make only one decision; we are not granted a second, third, or fourth life in which to compare various decisions.”

“We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.”

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

“Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.”

“The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”

“If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.”

“Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.”

“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.”

“The Transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.”

“You seem to be turning into the theme of all my paint­ings”, she said. “The meeting of two worlds. A double exposure. Showing through the outline of Tomas the libertine, incredibly, the face of a romantic lover. Or, the other way, through a Tristan, always thinking of his Tereza, I see the beautiful, betrayed world of the libertine.”

“But there was something more precious than his poems; something far away he didn’t yet possess and longed for—manliness; he knew that it could only be attained by action and courage; and if courage meant courage to be rejected, rejected by everything, by the beloved woman, by the painter, and even by his own poems—so be it: he wanted to have that courage. And so he said:“Yes, I know that the revolution has no need for my poems. I regret that, because I like them. But unfortunately my regret is no argument against their useless-ness.Again there was silence, and then one of the men said: “This is dreadful,” and he actually shuddered as if a chill had run down his spine. Jaromil felt the horror his words had produced in everyone there, that they were seeing in him the living disappearance of everything they loved, everything that made life worthwhile.It was sad but also beautiful: within the space of an instant, Jaromil lost the feeling of being a child.”

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”

“The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.”

“But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcée-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.”

“Is not parody the eternal lot of man?”

“Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.”

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

“Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”

“This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”