Quote

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

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
Doe
Soil
Make
Anyway
Stones
Difference
Longer
Dead
Differences
Covered
Whether
Graves

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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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The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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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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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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There is no perfection only life
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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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
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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.
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
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Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
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she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Milan Kundera