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Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 8

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

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

Character, Thinking, People

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Art, People, Imagination

"Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book edited by George Plimpton, October 1, 1986.

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

Rust, Movement, World

Milan Kundera (1983). “The Joke”, Viking Press

...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

Art, Media, Opaque

No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

Order

"The Joke". Book by Milan Kundera, 1967.

La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

Friendship, Memories, Flower

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

Sacrifice, Broken, Today

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

Thinking, Actors

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.

Tombstone, Flower, Garden

Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)

Men, Situations In Life, Return

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.

Dog, Animal, Men

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

Hero, Traps, Novel

If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

Talking, Two, People

The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Girl, Moving, Boys

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

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

Memories, Book, People

God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.

Dog, Kind, Has Beens

Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.

Sound, Individual, Partners

nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.

Waiting, Made, Response

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

Memories, Past, Track

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Courage, Law, Coincidence In Life

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

Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.

Drinking, Sky, Water

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Kitsch, Forgotten, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

Games, Lovers, Rules Of The Game

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Men, Giving, Monsters

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