Milan Kundera Quotes

Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.

But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A. The life of a divorcée-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed. The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.

الخلط بين المظهر الجسدي للمحبوبة ومظهر آخر: كم مرة سبق له ان عاش ذلك؟ عاشه دائماً بالدهشة ذاتها: هل الفرق بينها وبين الآخريات إذن بهذه الضآلة؟ كيف يمكن أن لا يعرف كيف يتعرف على طيب أحب الكائنات إليه، طيب الكائن الذي يعده لا مثيل له؟!

"A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles cease to exist.

We will never remember anything by sitting in one place waiting for the memories to come back to us of their own accord! Memories are scattered all over the world. We must travel if we want to find them and flush them from their hiding places!

Dogs are our link to Paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

But all he could think of was what Sabina would have said about it. Everything he did, he did for Sabina, the way Sabina would have liked to see it done. It was a perfectly innocent form of infidelity and one eminently suited to Franz, who would never have done his bespectacled student-mistress any harm. He nourished the cult of Sabina more as a religion than as love

ليس اكتمال التاريخ الانساني هو ما حلمت به، ولا إلغاء المستقبل، لا، لا، ما تمنيته هو الاختفاء الكلي للبشر مع مستقبلهم وماضيهم، مع بدايتهم ونهايتهم، مع كل فترة وجودهم، مع ذاكرتهم برمَّتها، مع نيرون ونابليون، مع بوذا والمسيح، تمنيتُ الفناء الكلي لشجرة متجذّرة في بطنٍ صغير بلا سرة لأول امرأة حمقاء لم تكن تعرف ما تفعله، وأي أهوال كلفنا جماعها البائس الذي لم يمنحها أية متعة بالتأكيد

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to possess the endless variety of the objective female in the world.

What we have not chosen we cannot consider our merit or our failure.

birds of fortuity flutter down on her shoulders...

We have no idea any more what it means to feel guilty. The communists have the excuse that Stalin misled them, murdurers have the excuse that their mothers didn't love them. And suddenly you come out and say: there is no excuse. No one could be more innocent in his soul and conscience than Oedipus, and yet he punished himself when he saw what he had done.

"She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women. Don't let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.

The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was, "You don't know how happy I am to be with you." That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express."

She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women