Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 5

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves not others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of intimate secrets about themselves and their friends. A man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up on his own free will is a monster. That is why Sabina did not suffer in the least from having to keep her love a secret. On the contrary, only by doing so could she live the truth.

As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited!As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch.

The meaning did not precede the dream; the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along. Not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded.

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. From the time he met Tereza, no woman had the right to leave the slightest impression on that part of his brain.Tereza occupied his poetic memory like a despot and exterminated all other trace of other women. That was unfair, because the young woman he made love to on the rug during the storm was not a bit less worthy of poetry than Tereza. She shouted, ‘Close your eyes! Squeeze my hips! Hold me tight!; she could not stand it that when Tomas made love he kept his eyes open, focused and observant, his body ever so slightly arched above her, never pressing against her skin. She did now want him to study her. She wanted to draw him into the magic stream that may be entered only with closed eyes. [..] She wanted to merge with him. [..] 'It’s not sensual pleasure I’m after,’ she would say, 'it’s happiness. And pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.’ In other words, she was pounding on the gate of his poetic memory. But the gate was shut. There was no room for her in his poetic memory. There was room for her only on the rug.

Without asking her permission, someone is trying to intrude her life, draw her attention, in short, to bother her.

He thought: that's certainly how it starts. One day a person puts his legs up on a bench, then night comes and he falls asleep. That's how it happens that one fine day a person joins the tramps and turns into one of them.

In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

And do you know the story about Haydn’s head? They cut it away from the still-warm cadaver so some insane scientist could take apart the brain and pinpoint the location of musical genius. And the Einstein Story? He’d carefully written his will with instructions to cremate him. They followed his orders, but his disciple, ever loyal and devoted, refused to live without the master’s gaze on him. Before the cremation, he took the eyes of the cadaver and put them in a bottle of alcohol to keep them watching him until the moment he should die himself. That’s why I said that the crematory fire is the only way our bodies can escape them. It’s the only absolute death. And I don’t want any other. Jean-Marc, I want an absolute death.

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history, and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration. A face is like a name. It must have happened some time toward the end of my childhood: I kept looking in the mirror for such a long time that I finally believed that what I was seeing was my self. My recollection of this period is very vague, but I know that the discovery of the self must have been intoxicating. Yet there comes a time when you stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself: this is my self? And why? Why did I want to identify with this? What do I care about this face? And at that moment everything starts to crumble. Everything starts to crumble.

The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

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

On her way toward the shore, she kept coming across weekend tourists. Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking beside him; the man's expression was meek, solicitous, smiling, a bit embarrassed, and endlessly willing to bend over the child, wipe its nose, soothe its cries; the woman’s expression was blasé, distant, smug, sometimes even (inexplicably) spiteful. This pattern Chantal saw repeated in several variants: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller and also carrying another baby on his hack, in a specially made sack: the man alongside a woman was pushing the stroller, carrying one baby on his shoulders and another in a belly carrier: the man alongside a woman had no stroller but was holding one child by the hand and carrying three others, on his back, his belly, and his shoulders. Then, finally, with no man. a woman was pushing the stroller: she was doing it with a force unseen in the men, such that Chantal, walking on the same sidewalk, had to leap out of her way at the last moment.Chantal thinks: men have daddified themselves. They aren't fathers, they're just daddies, which means: fathers without a father's authority.

For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.

Let the planet be convulsed with exploding bombs, the country ravished daily by new hordes, all his neighbors taken out and shot - he could accept it all more easily than he dared to admit. But the grief implicit in Tereza's dream was something he could not endure.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

Because beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them; when people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel. When someone jumps into the water fully clothed, it is another thing entirely: the only person who jumps into the water fully clothed is a person trying to drown; and a person trying to drown does not dive headfirst; he lets himself fall: thus speaks the immemorial language of gestures.