Milan Kundera Quotes

أجل، كان مستعدًا لتذويب كل عيوبها فى محلول حبّه، لكن بشرط واحد هو : أن تتمدد هى نفسها باستسلام فى هذا المحلول، وألا تفكر قط فى مغادرة حوض الحب هذا، وأن تظل دائمًا مغمورة تمامًا تحت سطح أفكاره وكلامه. أن تظل مغمورة فى عالمه، وألا ترتاد أى بقعة من جسدها وروحها أىّ عالم آخـر !

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

كانت فكرة أنه عاجز عن فعل شىء تغرقه فى حالة من الذهول وتهدىء من روعه فى آن واحد.

كلما كان الزمن الذي نخلفه وراءنا أكبر كلما أصبح الصوت الذي يحثّنا على العودة لا يُقاوم ، يبدو هذا الحكم مبدءاً عاماً، لكنه مزيف.
فالكائن البشري يشيخ والنهاية تقترب، فتصبح كل لحظة ثمينة ولا يعود هناك وقت يُضيّع على الذكريات.
يجب فهم التناقض الرياضي الظاهري للحنين : يظهر هذا بقوة في مرحلة الشباب الأولى، حين يكون حجم الحياة الماضية زهيداً.

Her kitsch was the image of home, all peace, quiet, and harmony, and ruled by a loving mother and a wise father. It was an image that took shape in her after the death of her parents. The less her life resembled the sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic, and more than once she shed tears when the ungrateful daughter in a sentimental film embraced the neglected father as the windows of the happy family's house shone out into the dying day.

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth wil be possible on a basis of kitsch.

"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 fashion."

...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

أن تشعـر بالذنب أو تُشعـَرَ به. أعتقد أن كل شئ يكمن هنا. فالحياة هى صراع الجميع ضد الجميع. هذا معروف، لكن كيف يتجلى هذا الصراع فى مجتمع متمدن إلى هذا الحد ؟ لا يمكن للناس أن يهاجموا بعضهم بعضًا عندما يلتقون. يحاولون بدلًا من ذلك أن يلقوا على الآخرين عار الشعور بالذنب. وسيفـوز من ينجح فى جعل الآخـر مذنبًا. وسيخسر من يعترف بخطئه.

It was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is a dangerous as the situation in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark.

He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

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.