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"How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more."
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"There's no way to tell what will make someone break down in tears. There are some who will cry at the merest melancholy word, and there are some who need the longest, cruelest speech to even dampen one eyelash. There are those who will cry at any sad song but no sad book, and there are those who are immune to the most saddening newspaper articles but will weep for days over a terrible meal. People cry at silence or at violence, in a graveyard or a schoolyard."
"Let emotions happen naturally. If we try to control them they will never be released and will stick with us like a shadow. But if we can observe them with no judgement, no labels and when we do label them because it's difficult transmute them into positive creativity."
"Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate."
"Start with a cry, end with a smile."
"All overt and covert emotions would shrivel without the beam of contrast and comparison to supply context and implication. We need the value of counterpoise to recognize and distinguish between similar and dissimilar concepts. How do we identify the importance of hope if we never felt despair? How do we appreciate the value of society and companionship until we experience solitude and loneliness? What would any relationship be unless draped with the boughs of thoughts and feelings, without the ongoing interaction between conscientious action and unreserved devotion, without endless empathy fused with boundless love? In the ring of time, without the verve supplied by both the real and the imaginary, life would be bland, insipid, and lackluster."
"Subject to the law(s) of nature, hate is born to die."
"The human mind houses a rich depository of positive emotions. It also builds a penitentiary that contains cells of ugly emotions. Love and laughter are two of the most esteemed emotions. Hate and jealously are the two of the most odious emotions. Hate is the rawest of all emotions, making hatred the most difficult of all emotions to curb."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"The girl was grateful to the young man for every bit of flattery; she wanted to linger for a moment in its warmth and so she said, 'You're very good at lying.''Do I look like a liar?''You look like you enjoy lying to women,' said the girl, and into her words there crept unawares a touch of the old anxiety, because she really did believe that her young man enjoyed lying to women."
"No peace is possible between the novelist and the agélaste [those who do not laugh]. Never having heard God's laughter, the agélastes are convinced that the truth is obvious, that all men necessarily think the same thing, and that they themselves are exactly what they think they are. But it is precisely in losing the certainty of truth and the unanimous agreement of others that man becomes an individual. The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth — neither Anna nor Karenin — but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin."
"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
"There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless."
"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."
"Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event."
"A meadow is nothing but a field of suffering. Every second some creature is dying in the gorgeous green expanse, ants eat wriggling earthworms, birds lurk in the sky to pounce on a weasel or a mouse. You see that black cat, standing motionless in the grass. She is only waiting for an opportunity to kill. I detest all that naA ve respect for nature. Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as human, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror."
"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."
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