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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

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
Men
Perfectly
Honest
Faces
Many
Real

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Once her love had been publicized, it would gain weight, become a burden.
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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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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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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.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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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.
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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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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
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I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect the value of all values.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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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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