{"author":"Milan Kundera","author_id":"Milan+Kundera","total_quotes":259,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["lying","men","relationships","women"],"id":1540,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me – but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (I'd fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each other's fine striations as they touched in emotion).In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; I'd grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasn't even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["celibacy","chastity","innocence","love"],"id":4782,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. (...) The 'Tell the truth!' imperative drummed into us so automatically that we feel ashamed of lying even to a secret policeman.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["ethics","irony","philosophy-of-language"],"id":4894,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["birth","characters","metaphor"],"id":10343,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"Metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["danger","metaphor","rhetoric"],"id":12546,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"The longing for Paradise is man's longing not to be man.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["human-condition","humanity","life","nature","nurture","philosophy","roots"],"id":16115,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["foolishness","human-nature","modern-life","novels","writing"],"id":17104,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["inspirational","mystery","thought-provoking"],"id":19513,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"The unification of the planet's history, that humanist dream which God has spitefully allowed to come true, has been accompanied by a process of dizzying reduction. True, the termites of reduction have always gnawed away at life: even the greatest love ends up as a skeleton of feeble memories. But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation; social life is reduced to political struggle, and that in turn to the confrontation of just two great global powers.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["cultural-hegemony","essay","functionalism","historicism","humanism","world-culture"],"id":21812,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"},{"text":"Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.","author":"Milan Kundera","tags":["code","czech","decode","enigma","forgetting","history","messages","myth","novel","past","signs","symbols"],"id":23972,"author_id":"Milan+Kundera"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":259,"pages":26,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}