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"Fortunately, I read (the books) without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction (or by my nature) I should not have loved."
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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"Some books sold because they are (said to be) great. Some are (said to be) great because they sold."
"The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose."
"Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose."
"This would be...a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power."
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
"No, said Bran. "I haven't. And if I have it doesn't matter. Sometimes Old Nan would tell the same story she'd told before, but we never minded, if it was a good story. Old stories are like old friends, she used to say. You have to visit them from time to time."
"Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over."
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"For what was it about books that once finished left the reader in a bit of a haze and made them reread the last few sentences in order to continue the ringing in their hearts a while longer, so as not to let the silence illumine the fact that reading, they had gained something - distance, a lesson, a companion, a new world - but now, after the last full stop, they had lost something palpable and felt a little emptier than before."
"Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless."
Explore more quotes by Milan Kundera
"Most people willingly deceive themselves with a doubly false faith; they believe in eternal memory (of men, things, deeds, peoples) and in rectification (of deeds, errors, sins, injustice). Both are sham. The truth lies at the opposite end of the scale: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be rectified. All rectification (both vengeance and forgiveness) will be taken over by oblivion."
"The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."
"Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?"
"Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul, the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice."
"The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity. . . . The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity . . . a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future."
"Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another."
"People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end and that behind all the joyous 'onward and upward' slogans lurks the lascivious voice of death urging us to make haste."
"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."
"Humor: the divine flash that reveals the world in its moral ambiguity and man in his profound incompetence to judge others; humor: the intoxicating relativity of human things; the strange pleasure that conies of the certainty that there is no certainty.But humor, to recall Octavio Paz, is "the great invention of the modern spirit." It has not been with us forever, and it won't be with us forever either.With a heavy heart, I imagine the day when Panurge no longer makes people laugh."
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