Milan Kundera Quotes

Who am I kidding? I have no reason for being here other that the fact that I want to be near her.

He didn't know what he wanted. He only knew what he didn't want.

Do you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks. "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do." "What way might that be?" "As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me." " I am not afraid of you," Marco says.

Why do we argue? Life's so fragile, a successful virus clinging to a speck of mud, suspended in endless nothing.

You have to make a decision, what you want to do in life, ... Your deal can be, you can leave tomorrow. Soon as you leave, you will be forgotten.

A demon was asking me what I wanted. My eyes flicked to Al, and he shrugged. “What do you want?” he said softly.

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others.

If you don't know what you want, you'll probably get what somebody else wants.

I don't think our lives actually unfold with morals attached to them, or meanings that are easily extracted, or jokes designed to generate sympathy. I wanted to do the opposite - to offer up a life whose meanings can only be perceived through a tangle of desires, confusions, and textural details.

. . . the great thing to learn about life is, first, not to do what you don't want to do, and, second, to do what you do want to do.

Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess always will. But I love it just the same.

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

Well," Peter Van Houten said, extending his hand to me. "It is at any rate a pleasure to meet such ontologically improbable creatures." I shook his swollen hand, and then he shook hands with Augustus. I was wondering what ontologically meant. Regardless, I liked it. Augustus and I were together in the Improbable Creatures Club: us and duck-billed platypuses.

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.

Life does not ask what we want. It presents us with options

What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want?” She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. Nobody would ever tell. It was all over. She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.

Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.

Life compulsively dangled the possibility of life. Life, the dramatist on speed. Life, that couldn't stop with its foreshadows and ironies and symbols and clues, its wretched jokes and false endings and twists. Life with its hopeless addiction to plot.

There are two things that you have to do in life: You have to die, and you have to live until you die. The rest is up to you.

Life is. I am. Anything might happen.

The assumption of perfect knowledge is very far from reality ... a lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional.

All over the world, relationships between men and women are very, very tricky and very difficult and you don't learn anything. It's not an exact science, so you can't learn anything. You're always going by instinct and your instinct betrays you because you want what you want when you want it.

Since when do we even play games?” “Since when don’t we play games? Games of life, games of death. Games of love, of hope, of chance, of despair, and of all the myriad wonders in between.” I rolled my eyes at the newcomer. “Hello, Carter.