Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kunderais a Czech-born writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores"...
NationalityCzechoslovakian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 April 1929
plato philosophy love-is
He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
suffering glimpse nostalgia
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
humility exaggeration-is together
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
sunset auras unbearable
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
unbearable-lightness-of-being partners claims
The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.
perfection
There is no perfection only life
novelists historic given
For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?
pleasure ambiguity greater
The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
crazy love-is crazy-love
Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
tragedy shells way
...she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.
affliction bears should
Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
butterfly wind ridiculous
Immortality is a ridiculous illusion, an empty word, a butterfly net chasing the wind.
weight three heavy
Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
adventure land forever
No episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.