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rays of light they fill my quiet life

The Greek word for ‘return’ is ‘nostos’. ‘Algos’ means ‘suffering’. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
— Milan Kundera (via likeafieldmouse)

(Source: likeafieldmouse)


That the infinitude of the exterior world escapes us we accept as natural. But we reproach ourselves until the end of our lives for lacking that other infinitude. We ponder the infinitude of the stars but are unconcerned about the infinitude our papa has within him.

It is not surprising that in his later years variations become the favourite form for Beethoven, who knew all too well (as Tamina and I know) that there is nothing more unbearable than lacking the being we loved, those sixteen measures and the interior world of their infinitude of possibilities.
— Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

We are born one time only, we can never start a new life equipped with the experience we’ve gained from the previous one. We leave childhood without knowing what youth is, we marry without knowing what it is to be married, and even when we enter old age, we don’t know what it is we’re heading for: the old are innocent children innocent of their old age. In that sense, man’s world is the planet of inexperience.
— Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (via larmoyante)

(via larmoyante)


But all these efforts only showed that her husband’s image was irrevocably slipping away. At the beginning of their time together, he had asked her (ten years older than she, he had already gotten some idea of human memory’s wretchedness) to keep a diary that would record their life. She had resisted, declaring it would make light of their love. She loved him too much to admit that what she considered unforgettable could ever be forgotten. Finally, of course, she obeyed him, but with no enthusiasm. The notebooks showed it: there were many empty pages, and the entries were fragmentary.
— Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
— Milan Kundera (via luniversale)

(via iwillbeyourfairytale)


Schoenberg saw the bacterium, he was aware of the danger, but deep inside he did not grant it much importance. As I said, he was living in the very lofty spheres of the mind, and pride kept him from taking seriously an enemy so small, so vulgar, so repugnant, so contemptible. The only great adversary worthy of him, the sublime rival who he battled with verve and severity, was Igor Stravinsky. That was the music he charged at, sword flashing, to win the favour of the future.

But the future was a river, a flood of notes where composers’ corpses drifted among the fallen leaves and torn-away branches. One day Schoenberg’s dead body, bobbing about in the raging waves, collided with Stravinsky’s, and in a shamefaced late-day reconciliation the two of them journeyed on together towards nothingness (toward the nothingness of music that is absolute din).
— Ignorance - Milan Kundera