it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences i… - Milan Kundera

It is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

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.

The life we have left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints against us, of taking us to court.

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist.