“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
pg 209
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
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Milan Kundera 198
Czech author of Czech and French literature 1929–2023Related quotes
Source: La Vita Nuova (1293), Chapter I, opening lines (as reported in The 100 Best Love Poems of All Time by Leslie Pockell)
“Wedding: the point at which a man stops toasting a woman and begins roasting her.”
Syncopations
A Guide to Men (1922)
“In her first passion, a woman loves her lover, in all the others all she loves is love.”
“She can find in her bewilderment no words wherewith to begin, how to order or where to end her speech; fain would she pour out all in her first utterance, but not even the first words doth fear-stricken shame allow her.”
Nec quibus incipiat demens videt ordine nec quo
quove tenus, prima cupiens effundere voce
omnia, sed nec prima pudor dat verba timenti.
Source: Argonautica, Book VII, Lines 433–435
“A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying.”
The Suicide Club, Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk.
The New Arabian Nights (1882)
Song lyrics, The Essential Bob Dylan (2000), Things Have Changed (recorded 1999)
“The love of man and woman is the beginning of the love of God.”
Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)
Context: The love of man and woman is the beginning of the love of God. You can realise God within like many men have done. It's one of the rarest things on earth to realise God, but everybody seems to think that that's the end. Where I come from, realising God was the easy part of it. That God of love which is already here anyway - who wouldn't be able to realise it? The difficult part is to bring that God into this world where God or love is not, into that body listening to these words and this body speaking them. That's the task.