Quote

Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable

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
Reasonable
Listen
Pain
Doesn
Reason

More quotes by Milan Kundera

Image
La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera
Image
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
Milan Kundera
Image
The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
Milan Kundera
Image
Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
Milan Kundera
Image
A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
Milan Kundera
Image
Sad company is bad company.
Milan Kundera
Image
...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
Milan Kundera
Image
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
Image
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
Milan Kundera
Image
Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
Milan Kundera
Image
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
Image
The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
Milan Kundera
Image
This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
Milan Kundera