Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)

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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

Milan Kundera
Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.

Milan Kundera
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera
All of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others.

Milan Kundera
All man's life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others.

Milan Kundera
The reason we write books is that our kids don't give a damn. We turn to an anonymous world because our wife stops up her ears when we talk to her.

Milan Kundera
A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Milan Kundera
The gaze of a man has often been described. It seems to fasten coldly on the woman, as if it were measuring, weighing, evaluating, choosing her, as if, in other words, it were turning her into a thing.

Milan Kundera
People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

Milan Kundera
The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of "We are all writers!"
The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.
Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

Milan Kundera
Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.

Milan Kundera