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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Love
Dangerous
Metaphors
Word
Enters
Point
Unbearable
Woman
Poetic
Language
Metaphor
Dream
Begins
Metaphoric
Firsts
Memory
Metaphorical
First
Memories
Lightness

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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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[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.
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Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.
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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.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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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 fas
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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