"Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it."
Quote collection
Milan Kundera quotes (page 21 of 21)
410 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in."
"How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?"
"Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent."
"For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought."
"Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing."
"He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life."
"The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted."
"A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality."
"No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?"