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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

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
Longing
Halves
World
Suddenly
Recalled
People
Seeking
Lightness
Philosophy
Split
Half
Unbearable
Lost
Splits
Another
Plato
Hermaphrodites
Two
Wander
Symposium

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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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.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
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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.
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
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We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
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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.
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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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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
Milan Kundera