1,075 Quotes by Milan Kundera

Today we’re all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy towards our work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.

She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.

When young people's education is at stake, compromise is crime.

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

Tandis qu'il se mouvait sur elle, en avant puis en arrière, il lui semblait décrire sans cesse le même mouvement, de l'enfance à l'âge adulte puis en sens inverse, et encore une fois du petit garçon qui regardait misérablement un gigantesque corps de femme à l'homme qui étreint ce corps et le dompte. Ce mouvement, qui mesure habituellement quinze centimètres à peine, était long comme trois décennies.

Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?