Milan Kundera Quotes

Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse.

Our memories, they can be inviting. But some are altogether, mighty frightening.

I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real.

My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.

What else does anyone have except for a collection of slightly painful memories?

Writers, like elephants, have long, vicious memories. There are things I wish I could forget.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.

Other memories stick, no matter how much you wish they wouldn’t. They’re like a song you hate but can’t ever get completely out of your head, and this song becomes the background noise of your entire life, snippets of lyrics and lines of music floating up and then receding, a crazy kind of tide that never stops.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands.

For that was the terrible power of the dementors: to force their victims to relive the worst memories of their lives, and drown, powerless, in theirown despair. . . .

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.

Though the past haunt me as a spirit, I do not ask to forget.

Why do people have memories? It would be easier to die - anything to stop remembering.

The devil! what beastly things our memories insist on cherishing!

Keep out of the past. It is haunted.

Mazer, i don't want to keep dreaming these things. I'm afraid to sleep. I keep thinking of things i don't want to remember. My whole life keeps playing out as if i were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life

The memory fades, and I’m left hanging on to the ghosts of his words.

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

Forgetting isn't enough. You can paddle away from the memories and think they are gone. But they will keep floating back, again and again and agian. They circle you, like sharks. Until, unless, something, someone? Can do more than just cover the wound.

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

I don't even want to go back to '81.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.

But... what about us? What about the past?" she asks blankly. "The past isn't real. it's just a dream," I say. "Don't mention the past.