Milan Quotes

Eugenio Montale - born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981 - is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets. ~ Jonathan Galassi

Another factor: Christianity offered opportunities for advancement in the church to intelligent young men, some of whom might otherwise have become mathematicians or scientists. Bishops and presbyters were generally exempt from the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil courts, and from taxation. A bishop such as Cyril of Alexandria or Ambrose of Milan could exercise considerable political power, much more than a scholar at the Museum in Alexandria or the Academy in Athens. This was something new. Under paganism religious offices had gone to men of wealth or political power, rather than wealth and power going to men of religion. For instance, Julius Caesar and his successors won the office of supreme pontiff, not as a recognition of piety or learning, but as a consequence of their political power. ~ Steven Weinberg

I have looked high." Her voice was an urgent whisper. "And I have fallen farther than you can imagine. So don't you lecture me. All I want is to pretend that this is enough - that I can be satisfied by the scraps that remain to me. " He had ~ Courtney Milan

The practice of perfect virtue does not require teaching, but instructs others. ~ Ambrose Of Milan

I understand you, and I shall not attempt to make you change your mind. I am too old to want to improve the world. I have told you what I think, and that is all. I shall remain your friend even if you act contrary to my convictions, and I shall help you even if I disagree with you. ~ Milan Kundera

A sign on the door proclaimed: The countess is NOT to be bothered except in the cases of death, disembowelment, the Apocalypse, or the arrival of her mother. ~ Courtney Milan

In Czech, according to Milan Kundera, litost is a state of agony and torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery. ~ Rabih Alameddine

London is the financial capital of Europe, a great platform to America and Asia. I love the fact that in British culture you can be whoever you want, and people don't even look at you. I don't feel that in Paris or Milan. ~ Lapo Elkann

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them. ~ Milan Kundera

It was the first hint that she'd given that there was anything to her but an excess of shyness. He'd begun to actually doubt his own memory. Surely this woman hadn't come to his house and attempted blackmail. ~ Courtney Milan

Brod was a brilliant intellectual with exceptional energy; a generous man willing to do battle for others; his attachment to Kafka was warm and disinterested. The only problem was his artistic orientation: a man of ideas, he knew nothing of the passion for form; his novels (he wrote twenty of them) are sadly conventional; and above all: he understood nothing at all about modern art.
Why, despite all this, was Kafka so fond of him? What about you-do you stop being fond of your best friend because he has a compulsion to write bad verse? ~ Milan Kundera

Franz shook his head. When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities. ~ Milan Kundera

It was like coming home to a place that he held dear and finding that the wood had burnt to the ground and the house was in ruins. ~ Courtney Milan

I used to think that the world could not spin correctly on its axis if he were not present."

"I'm sure you've learned otherwise."

"Oh, no." Theresa shook her head. "I've just learned to walk off-center. ~ Courtney Milan

Only animals were not expelled from Paradise. ~ Milan Kundera

Every one of my novels could be entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Joke or Laughable Loves; the titles are interchangeable, they reflect the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and unfortunately, restrict me. Beyond these themes, I have nothing else to say or write. ~ Milan Kundera

Irena went to the window to savor the freedom of solitude. ~ Milan Kundera

The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence ~ Milan Kundera

Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all. ~ Milan Kundera

When I go to Rome, I fast on Saturday, but in Milan I do not. Do you also follow the custom of whatever church you attend, if you do not want to give or receive scandal. ~ Saint Ambrose

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. ~ Milan Kundera

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable. ~ Milan Kundera

Now come," he said. "Does your Alex love you back, or is he a hopeless idiot?"
"He loves me," she said quietly. "But I'm afraid he'll stop after we marry. He'll change his mind. He'll - "
"He'll love you more. Trust me."
"Really?" She was far too somber.
"Really." He had no words to make her smile, and so Gareth tweaked her nose.
And she giggled.
It had been a long time since he'd laughed. But despite all those years, he still remembered how. What he'd
forgotten was the lightness of his soul when he did so. The moment was perfect. ~ Courtney Milan

..people do need some commandment to rule over them in our century, when god's ten have been virtually forgotten! the whole moral structure of our time rests on the eleventh commandment; and the journalist came to realize that thanks to a mysterious provision of history he is to become its administrator, gaining a power undreamed of by a hemingway or an orwell. ~ Milan Kundera

Defiance. He swallowed. It wasn't enough for him - not anymore. He wanted to be more than her defiance. He wanted to be her strength, her amusement. He wanted to be her lover. He wanted to be her every wicked desire and her safe haven, all at once. ~ Courtney Milan

Love is a continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love. ~ Milan Kundera

Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to demand-free and asking but his company. ~ Milan Kundera

The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.

The more indifferent people are to politics, to the interests of others, the more obsessed they become with their own faces. The individualism of our time.

Not being able to fall asleep and not allowing oneself to move: the marital bed.

If high culture is coming to an end, it is also the end of you and your paradoxical ideas, because paradox as such belongs to high culture and not to childish prattle. You remind me of the young men who supported the Nazis or communists not out of cowardice or out of opportunism but out of an excess of intelligence. For nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of nonthought… You are the brilliant ally of your own gravediggers.

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.

How to live in a world with which you disagree? How to live with people when you neither share their suffering nor their joys? When you know that you don't belong among them?... our century refuses to acknowledge anyone's right to disagree with the world…All that remains of such a place is the memory, the ideal of a cloister, the dream of a cloister…

Humor can only exist when people are still capable of recognizing some border between the important and the unimportant. And nowadays this border ha ~ Milan Kundera

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death. ~ Milan Kundera

In order to make the novel into a polyhistorical illumination of existence, you need to master the technique of ellipsis, the art of condensation. Otherwise, you fall into the trap of endless length. ~ Milan Kundera

It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life
and herein lies its secret
takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch. ~ Milan Kundera

When he's like this, Miss Lowell," Mark offered from his seat on the sofa, "I usually take it upon myself to stamp out in a rage."

"Must I stamp? Or can I sweet out gracefully?" "By all means, sweep. ~ Courtney Milan

It had been so long since anyone had made her feel fluttery. It felt like winter sunshine - something to be savored because it surely wouldn't last. ~ Courtney Milan

New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end ... It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America. ~ Bernard DeVoto

He'd fallen a little bit in love with her the moment she'd said his name as if it had value. ~ Courtney Milan

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures. ~ Milan Kundera

After living and working in Milan and Paris, I arrived in New York City 20 years ago, and I saw both the joys and the hardships of daily life. On July 28, 2006, I was very proud to become a citizen of the United States - the greatest privilege on planet Earth. ~ Melania Trump

Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her. ~ Milan Kundera

The ethic of ecstasy is the opposite of the trial's ethic; under its protection everybody does whatever he wants: now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes, from infancy to graduation, and it is a freedom no one will be willing to give up; look around you on the Metro; seated or standing, every single person has a finger in some orifice of his face-in the ear, in the mouth, in the nose; no one feels he's being observed, and everyone dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self, which is picking its nose; no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others. In this situation of uniform egocentricity, the sense of guilt does not play the role it once did; the tribunals still operate, but they are fascinated exclusively by the past; they see only the core of the century; they see only the generations that are old or dead. ~ Milan Kundera

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them. ~ Milan Kundera

Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all. ~ Milan Kundera

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything. ~ Milan Kundera

Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections. ~ Milan Kundera

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: -
(1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities
(2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. ~ Milan Kundera

Three quarters of respectable England hates you."
"Half," Sebastian replied with a smile. "It's really only half. Judging by my correspondence, it may be as little as forty-eight percent. And of those, only a small number want to cause me bodily harm. The rest just wish to have me gagged or thrown in prison. ~ Courtney Milan

My dear
colleagues, as you know, the greatest misfortune for a man is a happy marriage; he hasn't the
slightest hope of a divorce. ~ Milan Kundera

Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child. ~ Milan Kundera

For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought. ~ Milan Kundera

The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy. ~ Milan Kundera

The naked woman marched around the swimming pool, the corpses in the hearse rejoicing that she, too, was dead - these were the "down below" she had feared and fled once before but which mysteriously beckoned her. These were her vertigo: she heard a sweet (almost joyous) summons to renounce her fate and soul. The solidarity of the soulless calling her. And in times of weakness, she was ready to heed the call and return to her mother. She was already to dismiss the crew of her soul from the deck of her body; ready to descend to a place among her mother's friemd and laugh when one of them broke wind noisily; ready to march around the pool naked with them and sing. ~ Milan Kundera

I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be. ~ Milan Kundera

Turning points in the evolution of a relationship are not always the result of dramatic events; they often stem from something that at first seems completely inconsequential. ~ Milan Kundera

You're perfectly right. There's no two ways about it. When you leave, it will slay me. ~ Courtney Milan

To have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain ~ Milan Kundera

My favorite thing about Milan is that you see these guys, and it's as if a spaceship came out of the most attractive planet invented and just dropped them off all across the city. ~ Brad Goreski

Do not pollute my perfectly acceptable figurative speech with irrelevant facts! ~ Courtney Milan

Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments. ~ Milan Kundera

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world's store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library. ~ Milan Kundera

First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life. ~ Milan Kundera

People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation. ~ Milan Kundera

Forms which are in themselves quite ugly turn up fortuitously, without design, in such incredible surroundings that they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry. ~ Milan Kundera

The children laughing without knowing why - isn't that beautiful? ~ Milan Kundera

Don't lie!' 'Tell the truth!' are words which we must never say to another person in so far as we consider him our equal. ~ Milan Kundera

When he asked her why she was so silent, she told him she had not been satisfied with their lovemaking. She said he had made love to her like an intellectual. ~ Milan Kundera

...man is as much a parasite on the cow as the tapeworm is on man: We have sucked their udders like leeches. "Man the cow parasite" is probably how non-man defines man in his zoology books ~ Unbearable Lightness Of Being

In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster ~ Milan Kundera

I believe," he said, "that there is a special place in hell for those who steal truth. And that man - whoever he is - I hope he is burning there. ~ Courtney Milan

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album? ~ Milan Kundera

People were leaping off La Bestia and running as if chased by demons spilling from hell. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Melquis and Edith jump together; I could tell Solyapa was still in front of me. I let go more out of reflex than plan, and regretted it that instant, thinking that perhaps I should have helped Solyapa first. No matter, I was surprised by the jerky scrape of dirt against my flesh as it tugged and wrestled against me as I kept moving forward despite being on the ground. The dirt itself was surprisingly hot; there was red in my eyes, nothing was clear; I felt a pain over the front of my head and my right eye was throbbing. ~ -Milan Sime Martinic, Ironway: Watching Over Benjamin Hill -

She admired her passion, knowing that passion is by definition excessive. ~ Milan Kundera

Holding her tightly in his arms and feeling her body tremble, he thought he could not endure his love. ~ Milan Kundera

A life without risk is one where I tell myself I'm not worthy of taking a chance. ~ Courtney Milan

All human beings have always aspired to an idyll, to that garden where nightingales sing, to that realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man and man against other men, but rather where the world and all men are shaped from one and the same matter. There, everyone is a note in a sublime Bach fugue, and anyone who refuses to be one is a mere useless and meaningless black dot that need only be caught and crushed between thumb and finger like a flea. ~ Milan Kundera

One mustn't justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat. ~ Courtney Milan

Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book... ~ Milan Kundera

She shouldn't have been beautiful - she was too forward, too freckled, too thin. Still ... Oh, to hell with it all. He wasn't hungry, anyway. He reached out and took her hand, drawing her to him. She drifted near, until she was close enough to kiss. Close enough for him to see the green of her eyes, widening as he turned her hand over, palm up.
"There's something I've wanted to do since the first moment I saw you," he said. It came out close to a whisper.
"Oh?" He could feel the puff of breath from that word against his nose.
"Don't even think of arguing."
She shook her head. Her lips opened, an impossible, inviting fraction.
He set the fork in the palm of her hand and closed his fingers tightly around hers. "I want you to eat," he said. ~ Courtney Milan

It was a curious game. This curiousness was evidenced, for example, in the fact that the young man, even though he himself was playing the unknown driver remarkably well, did not for a moment stop seeing his girl in the hitchhiker. And it was precisely this that was tormenting. He saw his girl seducing a strange man, and had the bitter privilege of being present, of seeing at close quarters how she looked and of hearing what she said when she was cheating on him (when she had cheated on him, when she would cheat on him). He had the paradoxical honor of being himself the pretext for her unfaithfulness.
This was all the worse because he worshipped rather than loved her. It had always seemed to him that her inward nature was real only within the bounds of fidelity and purity, and that beyond these bounds she would cease to be herself, as water ceases to be water beyond the boiling point. ~ Milan Kundera

Miss Marshall was wearing a ghastly green gown, one that had no doubt been lent to her by a friend. It fit rather poorly, gaping at the bosom and stretching at the hips. The color dimmed the fire of her hair - which, without her normal pins, refused to stay in place. Little strands made an auburn halo around her head.
He'd never seen anything quite so lovely. ~ Courtney Milan

I believe that women are human beings. That belief is not diametrically opposed to thinking that men are human beings, and that if one human being has the opportunity to be kind to another, she should do so. ~ Courtney Milan

The life we've left behind us has a bad habit of stepping out of the shadows, of bringing complaints to us, of taking us to court. ~ Milan Kundera

The novel's spirit is the spirit of complexity ... The novel's spirit is the spirity of continuity ... a thing made to last, to connect the past with the future. ~ Milan Kundera

She wanted him to be right. She needed him to be wrong. And while that sounded as if she were confused, confusion implied uncertainty. And Margaret was dead certain that he was both the last man on earth that she should kiss, and the only one she dreamed of holding. ~ Courtney Milan

Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty. ~ Milan Kundera

It's interesting how much you can tell about someone from their friends. ~ Lindsey Kelk

No one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it. ~ Milan Kundera

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love. ~ Milan Kundera

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not. ~ Milan Kundera

I have a strong will to love you for eternity. ~ Milan Kundera

This wasn't a case of gilding the lily. If there was a lily underneath all that, it had long since been crushed to a pulp. The party stopped in its tracks as she took off her cloak, frozen in wordless contemplation of a wardrobe that made the word "gaudy" sound sweet and demure by contrast. ~ Courtney Milan

His eyes traced the elegant line of her neck as she swiveled around to face him, her eyes sparking like collapsed stars swallowing up the surrounding light. She was a dark star, a black hole in the endless sky, and if he got too close, he would surely disappear. He knew all this, but even then, he couldn't turn away from her. ~ Maura Milan

Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood. ~ Milan Kundera

Never had she let herself go in this way with another body, and never had another body let itself go with her in this way. Her lover could play with her belly, but he had never lived in there; he could touch her breast, but he never drunk from it. ~ Milan Kundera

Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions. ~ Milan Kundera

He tried to remind himself , don't think about her! don't think about her! he said to himself, i am sick with compassion ~ Milan Kundera

War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either. ~ Milan Kundera

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words. And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned into trash, chaff dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head. they were his insomnia, his illness. And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely, but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing, over-poering, window-rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words. Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word! ~ Milan Kundera

The best actors do not let the wheels show. ~ Milan Kundera

It means what you are, wanting what you want and going after it without a sens od shame. People are slaves to rules. ~ Milan Kundera

I am a great believer in loyalty, trust and integrity. Gary made a commitment to this club, the supporters and myself and I fully expect him to homour that commitment. ~ Milan Mandaric

The less her life resembled that sweetest of dreams, the more sensitive she was to its magic. ~ Milan Kundera