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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
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
Characters
Crossed
Possibility
Fond
Novel
Border
Character
Novels
Prose
Possibilities
Equally
Circumvented
Borders
Horrified
More quotes by Milan Kundera
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
Milan Kundera
The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
Milan Kundera
Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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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
Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
Milan Kundera
The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
Milan Kundera
... 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.
Milan Kundera
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
Milan Kundera
Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
Milan Kundera
The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Milan Kundera
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera
Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Milan Kundera
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
Milan Kundera
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
But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
Milan Kundera
All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Milan Kundera
I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Milan Kundera
I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
Milan Kundera
The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
Milan Kundera
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
Milan Kundera
