Quotes from Milan Kundera

Every morning they would talk about the horror of that return to their native land.

Scepticism does not abolish the world, it turns it into questions.

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise.

One day we'll be glad to have the pictures...

I catch myself thinking about him in the past tense all the time.

Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one's painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain. ? Milan Kundera, Immortality (Gardners Books; 1st edition, July 31, 2000) Originally published January 12th 1990.

Frequent mists swirling across the countryside drifted between me and the populated land, so that the world was as it was on the fifth day of creation, when God was still undecided whether he should hand it over to Man.

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

Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

The first betrayal is irreparable. It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal

The moment she removed his head from the body, she felt the strange and intoxicating touch of freedom. That anonymity of the body was a suddenly discovered paradise. With an odd delight, she expelled her wounded and too vigilant soul and was transformed into a simple body without past or memory, but all the more eager and receptive. She tenderly caressed Eva's face, while the headless body moved vigorously on top of her.

What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have hap-pened at all. If we have only one life to live,we might as well not have lived at all.