Milan Kundera Quotes

If a person is hit hard enough, even if she stands, she falls.

Falling hard and fast. And there didn't seem to be a thing I could do about it.

But I have vertigo... I lose my equilibrium easily. I can lean out to look at something and just keep leaning and not realize I'm about to fall.

When someone gets sick, it is easy to get walked all over, walk all over people, and be so beat down you agree to things you would never normally agree to.

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

The feeble soul merely whines and complains.

There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.

Take this and go back. I am conquered.

No one alive is more tormented nor weaker than myself.

Don't kick me when I'm down.

And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.

At this, Constance sat down on a rock and covered her face. She seemed smaller than ever now - so small the harbor breeze might catch her up like a scrap of paper and carry her away, carry her into nowhere.

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

He lay before God as a woman opens herself to a man, with legs apart, stomach exposed, arms open. But unlike some women, he did not have the inner strength that allowed them to do such a thing without fear. There was no woman’s strength in Mellas at all.

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

It's much too late to save myself from falling.

I have no power, and that's what's so humbling.

And one of his partners asked Has he vertigo? and the other glanced out and down and said Oh no, only about ten feet more.

She asked if we were calm enough for her to take off the cuffs, and McMurphy nodded. He had slumped over with his head hung and his elbows between his knees and looked completely exhausted--it hadn't occurred to me that it was just as hard for him to stand straight as it was for me.

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.

O your life, your lonely lifeWhat have you ever done with it,And done with the great gift of consciousness?What will you ever do before Death's knifeProvides the answer ultimate and appropriate?As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls,Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feels the vastDraft of the abyss sucking him down and down,An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown:This is the way the night passes by, thisIs the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

The hearts that never lean must fall.

I answered the voice that I was a poor girl who knew nothing of riding and warfare.