Quote

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

Milan Kundera

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Characters
Meditation
Novel
Seen
Existence
Character
Imaginary
Medium
Mediums

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
Image
Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
Milan Kundera
Image
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
Image
He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
Image
When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Milan Kundera
Image
The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
Milan Kundera
Image
The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Milan Kundera
Image
A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
Milan Kundera
Image
And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
Image
Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Milan Kundera
Image
Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
Milan Kundera
Image
The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
Milan Kundera
Image
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.
Milan Kundera
Image
Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera