Quotes by Milan Kundera

Dogs are our link to Paradise. They dont know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency.

an old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past.

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia.

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France.

Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.

During the last ten years of his life my father gradually lost the power of speech. At first he simply had trouble calling up certain words or would say similar words instead and then immediately laugh at himself. In the end he had only a handful of words left, and all his attempts at saying anything more substantial resulted in one of the last sentences he could articulate: Thats strange.Whenever he said Thats strange, his eyes would express an infinite astonishment at knowing everything and being able to say nothing. Things lost their names and merged into a single, undifferentiated reality. I was the only one who by talking to him could temporarily transform that nameless infinity into the world of clearly named entities.

Jealousy isnt a pleasant quality, but if it isnt overdone (and if its combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience theres even something touching about it.

Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. You mean you were really jealous? she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.

Jealousy is like a raging toothache. One cannot do anything when one is jealous, not even sit down. Once can only come and go. Back and forth.

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect.

[Large countries] patriotism is different: they are buoyed by their glory, their importance, their universal mission. The Czechs loved their country not because it was glorious but because it was unknown; not because it was big but because it was small and in constant danger. Their patriotism was an enormous compassion for their country.

...because love is continual interrogation. I dont know of a better definition of love.(in that case my friend Hubl would have pointe out to me, no one loves us more than the police. Thats true. Just as every height has its symmetrical depth, so loves interest has ts negative the polices curiosity. We sometimes confuse depth with height, and I can easily imagine lonely people hoping to be taken to the police station from time to time for an interrogation that will enable to talk about themselves.)

Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.

It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down. -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76

Her weakness was aggressive and kept forcing him to capitulate until eventually he lost his strength and was transformed into the rabbit in her arms .

He took her in his arms and lifted her up. She looked at him and he noticed only now that her eyes were full of tears. He pressed her to him. She understood that he loved her and this suddenly filled her with sadness. She felt sad that he loved her so much, and she felt like crying.

We dont know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We dont understand our name at all, we dont 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. A face is like a name. It must have happened some time toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror for such a long time that I finally believed that what I was seeing was my self. My recollection of this period is very vague, but I know that the discovery of the self must have been intoxicating. Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: this is my self? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble. Everything starts to crumble.