Life is Elsewhere Quotes

“Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all." (p.34)”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“life is like weeds”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Aren't we living in a world where heedless men only desire decapitated women?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“هل الرواية شيء آخر سوى فخ منصوب للبطل؟”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Revolution in Love’. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“...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.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Is not parody the eternal lot of man?”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“You are beautiful," he said, "But I will have to leave you.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“He was repelled by the pettiness that reduced life to mere existence and that turned men into half-men. He wanted to lay his life on a balance, the other side of which was weighted with death. He wanted to make his every action, every day, yes, every hour and minute worthy of being measured against the ultimate, which is death.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“The engineer’s ready capitulation, however, did not hide from the poet’s mother the sad realization that the adventure into which she had plunged so impulsively--and which had seemed so intoxicatingly beautiful--had no turned out to be the great, mutually fulfilling love she was convinced she had a full right to expect. Her father was the owner of two prosperous Prague pharmacies, and her morality was based on strict give-and-take. For her part, she had invested everything in love (she had even been willing to sacrifice her parents and their peaceful existence); in turn, she had expected her partner to invest an equal amount of capital of feelings in the common account. To redress the imbalance, she gradually withdrew her emotional deposit and after the wedding presented a proud, severe face to her husband.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“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.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Agora, o pintor dissertava longamente acerca da composição: o que há de mais bonito nos sonhos, dizia, é o encontro improvável de seres e de coisas que não poderiam encontrar-se na vida corrente; num sonhos, um barco pode entrar por uma janela num quarto de dormir, uma mulher que já não está viva há vinte anos pode aparecer deitada numa cama e, contudo, ei-la a subir para o barco que se transforma acto contínuo em caixão e o caixão põe-se a flutuar por entre as margens floridas de um rio.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“تضرب حكاية الشخصين الموشكين على أن يصيرا عشيقين بجذورها في القدم ،بحيث نستطيع نسيان العهد الذي تجري فيه .. ما ألطف أن يحكي المرء هذا النوع من المغامرات ! و ما ألذّ أن ينساها ، هي التي جفّفت نسغ حيواتنا القصيرة لكي نسخرها لهذه الأعمال التافهة، فما أجمل أن ننسي التاريخ !”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“He thus didn’t find himself outside the limits of his experience; he was high above it. His distaste for himself remained down below; down below he had felt his palms become sweaty with fear and his breath speed up; but here, up high in his poem, he was above his paltriness, the key-hole episode and his cowardice were merely a trampoline above which he was soaring; he was no longer subordinate to his experience, his experience was subordinate to what he had written.

The next day he used his grandfather’s typewriter to copy the poem on special paper; and the poem seemed even more beautiful to him than when he had recited it aloud, for the poem had ceased to be a simple succession of words and had become a thing; its autonomy was even more incontestable; ordinary words exist only to perish as soon as they are uttered, their only purpose is to serve the moment of communication; subordinate to things they are merely their designations; whereas here words themselves had become things and were in no way subordinate; they were no longer destined for immediate communication and prompt disappearance, but for durability.

What Jaromil had experienced the day before was expressed in the poem, but at the same time the experience slowly died there, as a seed dies in the fruit. “I am underwater and my heartbeats make circles on the surface”; this line represents the adolescent trembling in front of the bathroom door, but at the same time his feature in this line, slowly became blurred, this line surpassed and transcended him. “Ah, my aquatic love”, another line said, and Jaromil knew that aquatic love was Magda, but he also knew that no one could recognise her behind these words; that she was lost, invisible, buried there, the poem he had written was absolutely autonomous, independent and incomprehensible as reality itself, which is no one’s ally and content simply to be; the poem’s autonomy provided Jaromil a splendid refuge, the ideal possibility of a second life; he found that so beautiful that the next day he tried to write more poems; and little by little he gave himself over to this activity.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“via nas lágrimas tentáculos que queriam apanhá-lo para o arrancarem ao idílio do seu não-destino: as lágrimas repugnavam-lhe.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“O bom Deus foi injusto ao dar um rosto tão belo àquele imbecil e pernas curtas a Lermontov. Mas se o poeta não ter pernas compridas, possui um espírito sarcástico que o puxa para as alturas.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Sabe que só o abraço da morte pode apaziguá-lo, esse abraço que ele preencherá com o corpo todo e com a alma inteira e onde enfim achará a sua grandeza; sabe que só a morte pode vingá-lo e acusar de assassínio os que o escarnecem.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Xavier disse-lhe para onde iam. Ela respondeu que naquele quarto estava sua casa, enquanto lá onde Xavier queria levá-la não teria nem seu armário de roupas nem seu pássaro na gaiola. Xavier respondeu que um lar não é um armário de roupas nem um pássaro na gaiola, mas a presença de alguém a quem se ama. Disse-lhe depois que ele mesmo não tinha um lar, ou melhor, para exprimir-se de outra maneira, que seu lar estava nos seus passos, na sua caminhada, nas suas viagens. Que seu lar estava onde se abrissem horizontes desconhecidos.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere

“Universo interior!Eram grandes palavras, essas, e Jaromil ouviu-as com uma extrema satisfação. Nunca se esquecia de que coma idade de cinco anos era já considerado como uma criança excepcional, diferente das outras; o comportamento dos seus colegas de turma, que troçavam da pasta ou da camisa dele, confirmara-o, do mesmo modo (por vezes, duramente), na sua singularidade. Mas, até aqui, essa singularidade não fora para ele mais do que uma noção vazia e incerta; era uma esperança incompreensível ou uma incompreensível rejeição; mas agora, acabava de receber um nome: era um universo interior original; (...)o que lhe sugeria a ideia confusa de que a originalidade do seu universo interior não era o resultado de um esforço laborioso mas se exprimia por meio de tudo o que passava fortuitamente e maquinalmente pela sua cabeça; que lhe era dada, como um dom.”
― Milan Kundera, Life is Elsewhere