Milan Kundera Quotes

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.

I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.

The birds looked upon me as nothing but a man, quite a trifling creature without wings-and they would have nothing to do with me. Were it not so I would build a small cabin for myself among their crowd of nests and pass my days counting the sea waves.

I'd fly. I sit and watch the birds go by and say, I wish I could do that.

Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall and falling, they're given wings.

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.

If you no longer live, if you my beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain in my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but I shall live

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

So you shun me? - you shut yourself up and grieve alone! I would rather you had come and upbraided me with vehemence. You are passionate: I expected a scene of some kind. I was prepared for the hot rain of tears; only I wanted them to be shed on my breast: now a senseless floor has received them, or your drenched handkerchief. But I err: you have not wept at all! I see a white cheek and faded eye, but no trace of tears. I suppose, then, that your heart has been weeping blood?

Who falls from all he knows of bliss, Cares little into what abyss.

The ones I loved fly as birds in the open sky above me. Soaring, weaving, calling to me to join them. I want so badly to follow them, but the seawater saturates my wings, making it impossible to lift them. The ones I hated have taken to the water, horrible scaled things that tear my salty flesh with needle teeth. Biting again and again. Dragging me beneath the surface.

Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I'm suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there's no hearth here anyway and it's the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don't know why. I'm sorry Hailey. I don't know what to do.

For this alone on Death I wreak The wrath that garners in my heart: He put our lives so far apart We cannot hear each other speak.

O for a horse with wings!

Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.

You are born with the yearning arrow, my Glynna, though you are not yet fully aware of it. It is not a happy thing to possess, for nothing on earth - no goal, no person how ever beloved - will answer it. It points to the sky and to the heavens and the stars and when it cannot reach them, it must fall back to pierce your heart.

He felt he had lost it for good, he knew what it was to have been in communication with her, and to be cast off again. In misery, his heart like a heavy stone, he went about unliving.

We all yearn to fly. We are creatures of longing. We do not need to [physically fly] to be airborne. What I call the aerial instinct-the drive to transcend our present condition- is the defining characteristic of a human being. We are restless animals, eternal travelers who are forever in the process of becoming. Consciousness itself is a flight from the here and now to the beyond. Our reach always exceeds our grasp, which is what Heaven is for.

When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deeper than regret or pain or sorrow, it is the abyss into which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand.