Quotes from Milan Kundera

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer's occupation. We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

When the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear [...] without the mitigating circumstances of their transitory nature

Then what do you care about?' 'Love', she said with a smile. 'Love?' Franz asked in amazement. 'Love is a battle', said Marie-Claude, still smiling. 'And I plan to go on fighting. To the end.' 'Love is a battle? said Franz. 'Well, I don't feel at all like fighting.' And he left.

All the same, a seductive voice from afar kept breaking into her conjugal peace: it was the voice of solitude. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of a hunting horn coming from the depths of distant forests. There were paths in those forests...

We can never know what to want, because, only living one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor the perfect it in our lives to come.

And in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable

Clearly they had different concerns, but she understood that in her boyfriend's mouth the word "loneliness" took on a more abstract, a grander meaning: going though life without drawing anyone's interest; talking without being heard; suffering without stirring compassion; thus, living as she has in fact lived ever since then.

The tons of steel of the Russian tanks were nothing compared with it. For there is nothing heavier compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.

The genius of lyric poetry is the genius of inexperience.

For time spurred on by jealousy passes with amazing speed. Jealousy occupies the mind more completely than passionate intellectual work. The mind has not a moment of leisure. A victim of jealousy never knows boredom