Milan Kundera Quotes

McKenna will always be a part of me, no matter where he goes. They say that people who've lost a limb sometimes feel as if they still have it. How many times I've felt that McKenna was still here, and the empty space beside me was alive with his presence." She closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead and the tip of her nose touched the cool glass. "I love him beyond reason," she whispered. "He's a stranger to me now, and yet he is still so familiar. I can't imagine a sweeter agony, having him so close.

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

I missed her then but it was an odd sort of missing because by then, I knew the meaning of forever.

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.

It had been so long since she had seen him and she had lived on memories until they were worn thin.

The girl's lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.

I remember when we kissed. I still feel it on my lips. The time you danced with me with no music playing. I remember the simple things. I remember till I cry. But the one thing I wish I'd forget, the memory I wanna forget is goodbye.

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling; it can drown out anything.

Our hours in love have wings; in absence, crutches.

Absence and death are the same - only that in death there is no suffering.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone.

I miss the camera each moment and each day.

After I quit dancing, for a while it felt strange not to be in pain. It was as if an old friend - not a good friend, but a presence, always tagging along - had left me.

Homesickness is universal. But Neapolitan homesickness goes back further than the accidents of domicile. It is nostalgia for love and loss themselves, a soul-sickness caused by the very idea of leaving.

Those that he loved so long and sees no more, Loved and still loves,-not dead, but gone before,- He gathers round him.

MUSIC I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver,And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them,And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.And in my heart they will remember always: They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!

It was strange how you didn’t realise how much you loved a place until you had lost it completely.

There's no ifs and buts or maybes, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my loving.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

The entire world is a collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.

Perhaps - I want the old days back again and they'll never come back, and I am haunted by the memory of them and of the world falling about my ears.

AT first Raoden stayed away from the library, because it reminded him of her. Then he found himself drawn back to it—because it reminded him of her.

Is not absence death to those who love?