Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Milan Kundera

Categorized in : Unbearable Lightness Of Being Forgotten Kitsch

...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.

A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

essence religious sight

Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

splinters unity giving

Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter.

laughter men hands

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium... by Milan Kundera

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

existence meditation character

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enem... by Milan Kundera

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

men enemy world

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.

horse men order

"Pick me up," is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas... by Milan Kundera

"Pick me up," is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.

pick-me-up messages fall

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee. by Milan Kundera

Flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without a guarantee.

flirting guarantees promise

There are moments in life when a man retreats defensively, when he must give ground, when he must surrender less important positions in order to protect the more important ones. But should it come to the very last, the most important one, at this point a man must halt and stand firm if he doesn't want to begin life all over again with idle hands and a feeling of being shipwrecked.

men order hands

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.

Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

important air love-is

There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

unbearable-lightness-of-being violence love-is

What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

dumb essence character

By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, "it," he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.

mirrors names giving

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.

adults doe believe

and she realized that she (her soul) was not at all involved, only her body, her body alone. The body that had betrayed her and that she had sent out into the world among other bodies.

body soul world

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

forgive-me forgiving long

Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.

sacrifice broken today