Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 16

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I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

Milan Kundera

Laughter, Book, Angel

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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

Milan Kundera

Giving, Unity, Splinters

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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

Men, Light, Discovery

The Guardian, June 3, 1988.

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What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

Milan Kundera

Character, Essence, Dumb

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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

Milan Kundera

Kitsch, Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Existence

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim, (Part Six: The Grand March), 1984.

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By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.

Milan Kundera

Mirrors, Names, Giving

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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

Milan Kundera

Dog, Love Is, Men

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A gesture cannot be regarded as the expression of an individual, as his creation (because no individual is capable of creating a fully original gesture, belonging to nobody else), nor can it even be regarded as that person's instrument; on the contrary, it is gestures that use us as their instruments, as their bearers and incarnations

Milan Kundera

Expression, Creating, Individuality

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The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.

Milan Kundera

Childhood, Path, Steps

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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

Milan Kundera

Love Is, Air, Important

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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

Milan Kundera

Men, Enemy, World

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The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

Milan Kundera

Horse, Men, Order

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The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. This novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.

Milan Kundera

Courage, Character, Discovery

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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera

Sides, Uniforms, Nudity

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The best actors do not let the wheels show.

Milan Kundera

Funny, Humorous, Acting

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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

Milan Kundera

Real, Men, Faces

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Dogs are our link to paradise.

Milan Kundera

Dog, Pet, Links

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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

Milan Kundera

Doe, Ethics, Morality

New York Review of Books, July 19, 1984.

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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.

Milan Kundera

Soul, Unity, Age

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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.

Milan Kundera

Moments, Posthumous

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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Milan Kundera

Vocabulary, Together, Too Late

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Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.

Milan Kundera

Sleep, Gone, Nightmare

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Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

Milan Kundera

Long, Forgive Me, Forgiving

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Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Milan Kundera

Beauty, Art, Matter

"James Joyce, the Citizen and the Artist". Book by Charles Peake, 1977.

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In eroticism as dance: one of the partners is always charged with leading the other.

Milan Kundera

Dance, Partners

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Born: April 1, 1929
Occupation: Writer
Cite this Page: Citation

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