Dragonfly > Dragonfly's Quotes

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“i'm too fearful of the professors for whom art is only a derivative of philosophical and theoretical trends" (The Art of the Novel, 32)”
― Kundera

“All writing, all composition, is construction. we do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it. there is no mimesis, only poesis. no recording. only constructing.”
― Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future

“The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“Life is no way to treat an animal.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The tranquility of the countryside was the tangible sign of man's reign of terror.”
― Stéphane Audeguy, The Theory of Clouds

“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. and nowadays this border has become unrecognizable.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”
― Viktor E. Frankl

“I figured any nightmare would be better than my reality.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“But when you're concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.”
― Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened