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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
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University Teacher
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Brünn
Truth
Unintelligible
Intelligible
Underneath
Chaos
Surface
Lying
More quotes by Milan Kundera
We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
Milan Kundera
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Milan Kundera
Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
Milan Kundera
I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
Milan Kundera
Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Milan Kundera
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
Milan Kundera
The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.
Milan Kundera
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
Milan Kundera
Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
Milan Kundera
Speak truth to power.
Milan Kundera
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
Milan Kundera
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
Milan Kundera
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Milan Kundera
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
