Milan Kundera

Thanks to a post in Marginal Revolution I looked up Milan Kundera , thinking he was Indian , well turns out he’s Czech ,but nonetheless I really like the few quotes attributed to him that I looked up. His books are definitely going to become a part of my “ must read" list . In fact got 'inspired' to compile the previous post based on extracts from/reviews of Kundera's books

Identity (1998)
• I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare. (8)
• ...this is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared. (10)
• 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. (36)
• 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? (40)
• ...you can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more... (40)
• ...the eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated... (63)
• You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange. (78)
• 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. (82)
• Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together. (82)
• ...no love can survive muteness. (82)
• ...pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable. (129)
• ...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. (137)
• As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. (146)
• Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an afflication but learn to enjoy it. (146)
• [Chantal looking down at Jean-Marc as he sleeps...]
She said: "I get scared when my eye blinks. Scared that during that second when my gaze is switched off, a snake or a rat or another man could slip into your place." (168)

The Joke (1967)
• 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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)• .
• In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia...
• To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
• A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
• ...when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
• But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?
• Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.
• ...it was the call of all those fortuities... which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.
• ...it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.
• Dreaming is not merely an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.
• The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful.

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

• A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
o New York Review of Books (19 July 1984)

• 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.
o As quoted in The Guardian (3 June 1988)

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.


We must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.


The stupidity of people comes from having an answer to everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything... it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.


Happiness is the longing for repetition.


The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

“It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences … but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.”

Inexperience is a quality of the human condition. We are born one time only; we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we've gained from a previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is; we marry without knowing what it is to be married; and even when we enter old age, we don't know what it is we're heading for: The old are innocent children of their old age. In that sense, man's world is the planet of inexperience.