Excerpts from Milan Kundera's Living Elsewhere

All thoughts exist in this world for a long time in some fixed way. All we do is borrow books, just like borrowing books from a public library.

The painter's responsibility is not to reproduce the lines of things, but to build a new world on paper with his own lines.

When a woman can't fully enjoy her body, her body will become her enemy.

Art draws inspiration from other places, not from reason.

Love is crazy, otherwise it is not love.

The most beautiful thing in my dream is to meet people and things that I can't meet in my daily life.

The worst thing is not that the world is not free enough, but that mankind has forgotten freedom.

If we can't change the world, at least we should change our lives and live freely.

If everyone's life is unique, let's live in a unique way.

He loves her like a boxer loves butterflies, a singer loves silence, a robber loves the village primary school teacher, and he says he loves her like a butcher loves the frightened eyes of a calf, and lightning loves the tranquility of the roof. He said that he loved her as much as any woman who was loved.

Sleep, one eye looks at the moon, the other eye looks at the sun.

This is a beautiful sadness. She saw that she was brightened by this melancholy light and had a sad beauty.

Hello, melancholy. You are engraved in my beloved eyes.

Melancholy, beautiful face

If we suddenly realize our meanness, where can we escape? Only by escaping to the sublime can we escape from depravity!

His home is like an unknown horizon. He said that only by constantly changing from one dream to another and from one landscape to another can he survive. If he stays in the same environment for a long time, he will surely die.

Sleep is not the antonym of life for him; Sleep is life for him, and life is a dream. He went from one dream to another, as if life had changed from one life to another.

When a man is very happy, sleepiness always comes as compensation.

An empty and lifeless day.

He can't save his lost life, he can only give himself something great in his present life.

It is said everywhere that youth is the richest period in life. So where does this nothingness, this real waste of life come from? Where does this emptiness come from?

Do you think that the past is over forever and unshakable? Ah, no, the coat used to be made of shiny taffeta. Every time we look back, we will paint another layer of color on it.

Used to wear a shiny taffeta coat.

Warmth only exists when we are adults and recall the benefits that we couldn't realize in childhood with fear.

Warmth is the fear that adults bring us.

Warmth is trying to build an artificial space in which others are treated as children.

Warmth is also a fear of the physiological reaction of love, an attempt to make love escape from the adult world (in the adult world, love is insidious and compulsory, with heavy body and responsibility), and treat women as children.

Two breasts talk to each other in mysterious language.

Only when people are completely immersed in others can they become completely themselves.

Usually, when irreversible things are about to happen, people will accelerate the occurrence of events (perhaps to prove that we still have a little decision-making power in the process of events).

Freedom begins not where parents are abandoned or buried, but where they don't exist.

Here, people come into this world without knowing who brought it.

Here, man came into this world from an egg thrown into the forest.

Here, people are gouged out to the ground by heaven and step into this world without gratitude.

There is no conspiracy in love.

Love means everything.

On the issue of love, isn't it an absolute understanding of the person we love and everything about him, including his darkness?

His whole life was a long wait in an abandoned telephone booth. Before that, there was no contact and he could not get through to anyone's phone.

The future should be brand new, otherwise there will be no future. The future should be 100% pure, otherwise it will be defiled.

Showing off in front of the world is not the same as entering the world.

Young people are immersed in the future, not looking back.

Live somewhere else because it's true.

Only when a person is completely free to have a closed space, in which he can do whatever he wants, no one will see him and no one will monitor him, can he really enter the adult life.

Rhyme and rhythm have a magical power: the amorphous world, wrapped in this completely rhythmic poem, suddenly becomes clear, regular, bright and beautiful.

Lyricism is a kind of intoxication, and people are always intoxicated in order to better mix with the world.

The world will be free one day, just like the fragrance of pine trees among maple trees in the mountains and plains.

The future is the antonym of affirmation and the antonym of self.

A beautiful moment is meaningful only if it can withstand a beautiful eternity; If this beautiful moment comes from the defiled eternity, it is a lie.

Tears are the best product to wash away shame.

It's easy to fall in love with a talented, perfect and elegant woman: it's just a trivial reaction that beauty occasionally arouses in our hearts; The object of love that great love hopes to establish is precisely an imperfect creature, and it is precisely because of imperfection that it is more humanized.

If the absolute of pure peace does not exist, there will be infinite emotional absolute. In this absoluteness, just like chemicals, all impure and unfamiliar things can be dissolved.

In the field of poetry, all words are truth.

Life is as useless as crying.

Everything is over, sinking in silence, nothing is over, everything is echoing forever.

A lyrical genius is also an inexperienced genius.

My soul is a wonderful flower, with a special taste and a little nervousness. I have extraordinary talent, maybe I am a genius.

If you are not cruel enough to cruel people, you may be more cruel.

How sweet it is to forget the useless work that consumes our short life!

History will not only go along the road leading to the peak of life, but also immerse itself in a pool of dirty water in daily life.

Love means everything, otherwise it can't be considered love. Love is thorough, otherwise it can't be regarded as love. I'm here and he's on the other side.

True love is not listening to every word the rest of the world says.

Tears can make a person dissolve, especially when this person is no longer satisfied with being just a person and wants to cross the boundaries of natural nature; He believes that people can escape the existence of matter through tears, escape the boundaries as human beings, and integrate with the distance, thus becoming boundless.

The glory of responsibility comes from the cutting of love.

Death is just a message; Death is talking; The act of death has its own semantics. We should not ignore how a person died and what kind of living environment he lived in.

For those who are lost in self, love, emotion, madness, the mirror of life and the whirlpool of life, water can be a good destructive element.

From Milan Kundera's Living Elsewhere.