November 19, 1972

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful. ---  

Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory. — Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel



Thank you, dearest Cheryl, for those three words spoken 37 years ago. I love you, too. --Wayne 

The birth of a character

As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. — Milan Kundera, from The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Fear of falling?

What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which temps and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves. — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

On Seeing

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Milan Kundera -- Laughable Loves