Quotes by Milan Kundera

The physical contact with people who struck and trampled and killed one another seemed far worse to him than a solitary death in the purity of the waters.

Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but its too late, because a whole life has already been determined at a stage when we didnt know a thing.

The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. Its unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern. Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.

In a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them.

The unification of the planets history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces mans life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers.

On her way toward the shore, she kept coming across weekend tourists. Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking beside him; the mans expression was meek, solicitous, smiling, a bit embarrassed, and endlessly willing to bend over the child, wipe its nose, soothe its cries; the woman’s expression was blasé, distant, smug, sometimes even (inexplicably) spiteful. This pattern Chantal saw repeated in several variants: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller and also carrying another baby on his hack, in a specially made sack: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller, carrying one baby on his shoulders and another in a belly carrier: the man alongside a woman had no stroller but was holding one child by the hand and carrying three others, on his back, his belly, and his shoulders. Then, finally, with no man. a woman was pushing the stroller: she was doing it with a force unseen in the men, such that Chantal, walking on the same sidewalk, had to leap out of her way at the last moment.Chantal thinks: men have daddified themselves. They arent fathers, theyre just daddies, which means: fathers without a fathers authority.

Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me – but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (Id fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each others fine striations as they touched in emotion).In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; Id grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasnt even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her.

Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.

Tamina serves coffee and calvados to the customers (there arent all that many, the room being always half empty) and then goes back behind the bar. Almost always there is someone sitting on a barstool, trying to talk to her. Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I dont know, and its not very important. What matters is that she doesnt interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: Its absolutely the same with me, I... and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own Its absolutely the same with me, I...The phrase Its absolutely the same with me, I... seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the others thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemys ear by force. Because all of mans life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Taminas popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: Its absolutely the same with me, I...

Laughing deeply is living deeply.

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle. Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.

Isnt that exactly the definition of biography? An artificial logic imposed on an incoherent succession of images?

Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.