Milan Kundera Quotes

All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

And though I remember her name I cannot recall her face. All things pass.

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold, Let it be forgotten forever and ever, Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

When you do a movie, you don't know when it's going to come out. In a year, you forget about it.

And we forget because we must and not because we will.

The industry's memory is quite short, it's true.

Movies are written in sand: applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Most of the shows I've worked on have aired three times and are in the dustbin of history.

People will forget me pretty quick.

Dickens writes that an event, "began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.

The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

Great Time makes all things dim.

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?

They would grow old. They would forget me.

People are machines of forgetfulness

I did know once, only I've sort of forgotten.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.