Милан Кундера цитаты

страница 7

„Мы испытываем стыд не потому, что совершаем ошибки, а потому, что наше унижение видят все.“

„Нет чувства одиночества или даже плохого самочувствия. Только его место в порядке делает их хорошими или плохими.“

„Счастье - жажда повторения.“

„Человек - это всего лишь то, что являет собой его образ.“

„Нет ничего труднее, чем заставить понять юмор.“

“I can't shake off the idea that after death you keep being alive. That to be dead is to live an endless nightmare.”

“A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.”

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect some day to suffer vertigo.”

“Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.”

“Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”

“It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go.”

“No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.”

“For the first few seconds, she was afraid he would throw her out because of the crude noises she was making, but then he put his arms around her. She was grateful to him for ignoring her rumbles, and she kissed him passionately, her eyes misting.”

“It was the call of all those fortuities… which gave her the courage to leave home and change her fate.”

“No love can survive muteness.”

“Love is our freedom.”

“What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”

“He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.”

“…[O]f a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, […] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

“The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.
In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.”

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

“But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”