Milan Kundera: Frases en inglés (página 2)

Fuente: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Fuente: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Contexto: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Identity (1998), p 40

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, p. 59

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Contexto: What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Interview with Christian Salmon (Fall 1983), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven [Viking, 1988, ], pp. 217-218
Contexto: Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 22)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Contexto: 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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Contexto: Whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree “Be fruitful and multiply.”

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 22)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Contexto: 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.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Five: Lightness and Weight
Contexto: In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions. A question is like a knife that slices through the stage backdrop and gives us a look at what lies hidden behind it.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body, pg 37

Identity (1998), p 146

Testaments Betrayed (1995), p. 7
Contexto: Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the view­point of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil.

Fuente: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 8
Fuente: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part One: Lightness and Weight

Fuente: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Fuente: The Unbearable Lightness of Being