Milan Kundera Quotes

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

I love my friends and my past, and it's made me who I am.

I got love for Damon Dash as I did before. I don't know if we can be around each other in that way because times have changed. He may be a totally different person. I know I'm a different person. But nothing can erase that era, those times, those memories, those fights to get 'Roc-A-fella' where it was.

I got the best of Rod. And I am fully aware that, even though I love listening to his stories of the crazy days, no relationship could really last then. I sometimes wish I could go back in time to the 1970s or 1980s, sit at a bar, and observe him, but I'm glad our time came when it did.

We all have appointments with the past.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

One of things I like about looking at pictures when you're young and also meeting back with old friends you haven't seen in a long time is, for me, it's a glimpse of who I was.

We were younger. And it's basically like looking at football classics. You see things that you did, you see things that you could've done better and you think about all the good relationships that you had with the cast.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

I'm not into watching stuff I did last week, let alone three or four years ago.

Experience is what you have after you've forgotten her name.

People try to keep their past, like kind of holding on to their past. Every Springsteen song talks about that.

A lot of times as an actor you watch a film it's like thumbing through a photo book from your past. It's people you haven't seen in a while, there are people that have passed away, and there are people you owe phone calls to.

When all is said and done, I always used to say this to recruits: 'I don't remember one goal I scored. I don't remember one result. I just remember the people that touched my life and that connected with me.'

She said I bet you dont remember me And I said only every other memory.

Few people give themselves time to be friends.

Let us drink together, fellows, as we did in days of yore. And still enjoy the golden hours that Fortune has in store; The absent friends remembered be, in all that’s sung or said, And Love immortal consecrate the memory of the dead.

When you're going over periods of your life, you remember certain things, certain events, certain people that you've forgotten. You've forgotten certain lessons or people you were very close to, and then you haven't seen them in a while. I think if you can go through life with the correct regrets, then looking back on it, like I did, a certain portion of my life is pretty enjoyable. All my regrets are ones that I'd like to keep.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Poem for Liu Ya-tzu I cannot forget how in Canton we drank tea and in Chungking went over our poems when leaves were yellowing. Thirty-one years ago and now we come back at last to the ancient capital Peking. In this season of falling flowers I read your beautiful poems. Be careful not to be torn inside. Open your vision to the world. Don't say that waters of Kumming Lake are too shallow. We can watch fish better here than in the Fuchun River in the south.

Friends depart, and memory takes them To her caverns, pure and deep.

But today when I am 17 and warm and well fed, I'm keeping this journal for myself so I can always remember life as we knew it, life as we know it, for a time when I am no longer in the sunroom.