1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

I imagine the feelings of two people meeting after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t, have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect.

He reflected that he had only one life and that he wanted to live it somewhere else.

Only her husband had kept asking her questions, because love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.

Atunci am inteles semnificatia magica a cercului. Cand iesi din rand mai poti reveni. Randul este o formatiune deschisa. Cercul insa se inchide, si-l parasesti fara posibilitatea intoarcerii.

Dreaming is not only an act of communication; it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself. Our dreams prove that to imagine – to dream about things that have not happened – is among mankind’s deepest needs. Herein lies the danger. If dreams were beautiful, they would quickly be forgotten.

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.

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

Metaphors are not to be trifled with.

Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler’s concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?