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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 7

All Quotes Adventure Age Ambition Art Attitude Beauty Betrayal Brotherhood Certainty Character Childhood Children Choices Coincidence Compassion Culture Darkness Desire Doubt Drama Evil Fashion Feelings Film Funny Giving Goodness Happiness Hatred Heart Home Hurt Imagination Immortality Inspirational Joy Judgment Laughter Life Love Lying Memories Metaphor Morality Morning Nostalgia Passion Past Pleasure Reality Running Sadness Sleep Soul Struggle Stupidity Suffering Today Understanding Violence War Water Writing

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Daughter, Mother, Children

Darling, my darling, don't think that I don't love you or that I didn't love you, but it's precisely because I love you that I couldn't have become what I am today if you were still here. It's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is, because that's the world we've put the child into. The child makes us care about the world, think about it's future, willingly join in its racket and its turmoils, take its incurable stupidity seriously.

Children, Love You, Thinking

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.

Beautiful, Two, People

"Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

Voice, Calling, Return

A constant interrogation.

Love, Constant, Interrogation

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Love Is, Bird, Magic

A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Giving, Unbearable, Birth

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.

Adventure, Land, Forever

We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.

Mean, Past, Realizing

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

Hurt, Book, Men

In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.

Emotion, Sincerity, Pathos

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

Actors, Warning, Rehearsal

The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas.

Drama, Serious Subjects, Form

...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure.

Morning, Sleep, Blow

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Sunset, Auras, Unbearable

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being", 1988.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

Years, Knowing, Decision

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.

Art, Strong, Passion

"Nesnesitelna lehkost byti (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.

Children, Questions And Answers, Limits

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

Lying, Book, Past

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

Effort, Argument, Justify

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

Life, Might, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

To put it another way, every love relationship is based upon unwritten conventions rashly agreed upon by the lovers during the first weeks of their love. On the one hand, they are living a sort of dream; on the other, without realizing it, they are drawing up the fine print of their contracts like the most hard-nosed of lawyers. O lovers! Be wary during those perilous first days! If you serve the other party breakfast in bed, you will be obliged to continue same in perpetuity or face charges of animosity and treason!

Dream, Party, Drawing

All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual.

Bisexual, Novel, Great Novels

Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.

Affliction, Bears, Should

"Identity". Book by Milan Kundera, 1998.

Love is a battle, and I plan to go on fighting. To the end.

Fighting, Love Is, Battle

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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