Milan Kundera Quotes

The engineer’s ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poet’s mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively — and which had seemed so intoxicatingly beautiful — had no turned out to be the great, mutually fulfilling love she was convinced she had a full right to expect. Her father was the owner of two prosperous Prague pharmacies, and her morality was based on strict give-and-take. For her part, she had invested everything in love (she had even been willing to sacrifice her parents and their peaceful existence); in turn, she had expected her partner to invest an equal amount of capital of feelings in the common account. To redress the imbalance, she gradually withdrew her emotional deposit and after the wedding presented a proud, severe face to her husband.

Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?

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.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.'

Where to?' The girl feigned surprise.

Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man.

Is that any way to talk to me?'

It's the way I talk to whores.

All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was lying beside him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love for her. Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image of a new dream in her mind.

“I’m looking at the stars,” he said.

“Don’t say you’re looking at the stars. That’s a lie. You’re looking down.”

“That’s because we’re on an airplane. The stars are below us.”

“Oh, in an airplane,” said Tereza, squeezing his hand even tighter and falling asleep again. And Tomas knew that Tereza was looking out of the round window of an airplane flying high above the stars.

The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.

But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?

He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously the image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together.

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.

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

We've known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There's been one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power...All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.