Milan Kundera Quotes

I have no history but the length of my bones.

All of society is built to prop up that lie, the whole world a big, noisy puppet show meant to distract us from the fact that at the end, you'll die, and you'll probably be alone.

If our greatest fear is to sink away alone and unremembered, the brutality that time will inflict upon each of us will always run stronger than any river's murky waves.

Being immortal must have a lot of attractions. You can travel all over the world, see everything, do everything. But what happens if you are immortal and your friends and family are not? You are then destined to watch them age and die.

I inhabited a territory of loneliness which resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession.[It is] equal in its rapture and chilling exposure [to] the neighbourhood of the ancient gods and goddesses.

People who were born alone are defined by feelings like "Who's gonna be with me when I die? Who will ever understand me? Will I always feel so alone? Maybe if I write a book..." and you forget that that doesn't help you so much.

At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person - all my old friends are gone... & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world.

Getting old and dying alone is my worst fear.

If I die, I die friendless and abandoned. What choice did that leave him, but to live?

It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone.

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

She cried for herself, she cried because she was afraid that she herself might die in the night, because she was alone in the world, because her desperate and empty life was not an overture but an ending, and through it all she could see was the rough, brutal shape of a coffin.

How would you know if you were the last man on Earth? He said. I don't guess you would know it. You'd just be it. Nobody would know it. It wouldn't make any difference. When you die it's the same as if everybody else died too.

I sighed. 'It's hard. You're the only one who listens to what I have to say.' Longshot dropped a gentle, comforting arm around my shoulders. 'Then speak louder, girl. Don't let them put out your spark.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

The right to happiness is fundamental; men live so little time and die alone.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

The living have never shown me how to live.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

I am glad my life is coming to an end. To think that it might last another five hundred years, now that would be terrible, in my case.

He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn't really much else to do. Make something, and die.

We barely have enough time to figure out who we are and then we become bitter and isolated as we age.