Milan Kundera: Trending quotes

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Milan Kundera: 396 quotes10 likes

“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”

Milan Kundera

As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988)

“I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 8
Identity (1998)

“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”

Milan Kundera

New York Review of Books (19 July 1984)

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 56
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Six: The Grand March, Ch. 29

“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 209
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 36
Identity (1998)

“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.”

Milan Kundera The Joke

The Joke (1967)

“For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Pg 50
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“It was the call of all those fortuities… which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 51
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

“No love can survive muteness.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 82
Identity (1998)

“Love is our freedom.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 236
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight

“He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 137
Identity (1998)

“…[O]f a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, […] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 7)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)

“Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.”

Milan Kundera book Identity

pg 82
Identity (1998)

“But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 46
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body