Quote

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

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
Left
Irresistible
Time
Vast
Calling
Behinds
Return
Behind
Amount
Voice

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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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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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How goodness heightens beauty!
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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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.
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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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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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