Shigeru > Shigeru's Quotes

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“I have a strong will to love you for eternity.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

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

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Es muss sein. Es muss sein.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Andre Gide

“The color of truth is grey.”
― Andre Gide

“Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.”
― Andre Gide

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
― André Gide, Prometheus Illbound

“Envying another man's happiness is madness; you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“You have to let other people be right' was his answer to their insults. 'It consoles them for not being anything else.”
― André Gide, The Immoralist

“Then you think that one can keep a hopeless love in one's heart for so long as that?...And that life can breathe upon it every day, without extinguishing it?”
― Andre Gide

“To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says,but to go off with him and travel in his company.”
― Andre Gide

“What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.”
― Andre Gide, The Immoralist