“For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances...”
Author detail
Milan Kundera (1. dubna 1929 Brno – 11. července 2023 Paříž) byl česko-francouzský spisovatel. Od roku 1975 žil ve Francii, v roce 1979 byl zbaven československého státního občanství, roku 1981 získal občanství francouzské a v roce 2019 mu bylo vráceno občanství české. Texty psal nejdříve česky, později francouzsky. Do literatury vstoupil jako básník a dramatik, nakonec se ale stal celosvětově známým především jako prozaik a esejista. Jeho texty, zejména *Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí, Nesmrtelnost* a *Žert,* se zařadily mezi nejčastěji překládaná česká díla ve světě. Svá pozdější díla ve francouzštině k překladům do češtiny dlouho nesvěřoval, první přeloženou prózou do rodného jazyka se stala až Slavnost bezvýznamnosti v roce 2020. ---------- Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929, Brno – July 11, 2023, Paris) was a Czech-French writer. He lived in France since 1975, was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979, acquired French citizenship in 1981, and had his Czech citizenship restored in 2019. He first wrote his texts in Czech, later in French. He entered literature as a poet and playwright, but eventually became known worldwide primarily as a prose writer and essayist. His texts, especially *The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality* and *The Joke*,* are among the most frequently translated Czech works in the world. He did not entrust his later works in French to Czech translations for a long time, and the first prose work translated into his native language was The Celebration of Insignificance in 2020.
Quotes
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“For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances...”
“I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do it? And...”
“What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.”
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”
“When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The...”
“Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his v...”
“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have cir...”
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“Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.”
“Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.”
“Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no...”
“When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can’t go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they’re covered with soil or stones?”
“Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some politi...”
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“But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”
“For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?”
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“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...”
“He looked at her and tried to discover behind her lascivious expression the familiar features that he loved tenderly. It was as if he were looking at two images through the same lens, at two...”
“She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.”
“So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.”
“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 into...”
“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
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