Milan Kundera Quotes

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.

Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?

A single metaphor can give birth to love.

What dangers you run, O noble souls! Often, you give your heart, but we take only your body. Your heart is left to you and you look at it in the shadows and shudder.

The fairy tale emanates from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.

If we don’t risk being hurt, we cannot give unconditional love. Unconditional love gives others the right to hurt us.

I looked at the stained-glass image of the lamb in the window above me, but that only reminded me that lambs are famous for being led to slaughter, or sometimes hanging out with lions in ill-advised relationships.

Here she comes that little town flirt, you're falling for her and you're gonna get hurt.

he wouldn't mention, now or then, the illegal nine-millimeter automatic he had in his pocket. Why distress the woman you loved with minor details?

But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

Speak to me...be eloquent, be brilliant for me. Improvise! Rhapsodize!... I ask for cream and you give me milk and water... Please gather your dreams together into words. - Roxanne, Cyrano de Bergerac

All events became omens; I lost the ability to take anything literally.

You mustnt give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get.

What lies lurk in kisses.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

And maybe that was love. Being so vulnerable and allowing someone else in so far they could hurt you, but they also give you everything.

An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors.

Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives death to all things.

A man is in no danger so long as he talks his love; but to write it is to impale himself on his own pothooks.

A word only writes its night and rides its dream.

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food.