Kundera Nostalgia Quotes & Sayings

During the twenty years of Odesseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.
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For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, 'Tell us! — Milan Kundera

Whenever I think about ancient cultures nostalgia seizes me. Perhaps this is nothing but envy of the sweet slowness of the history of that time. The era of ancient Egyptian culture lasted for several thousand years; the era of Greek antiquity for almost a thousand. In this respect, a single human life imitates the history of mankind; at first it is plunged into immobile slowness, and then only gradually does it accelerate more and more. — Milan Kundera

If I were a doctor, I would diagnose his condition thus: "The patient is suffering from nostalgic insufficiency. — Milan Kundera

Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life [ ... ] from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these feelings. — Milan Kundera

The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. — Milan Kundera

In the sunet of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia. — Milan Kundera

An emigres artistic problem: the numerically equal blocks of a lifetime are unequal in weight, depending on whether they comprise young or adult years. The adult years may be richer and more important for life and for creative activity both, but the subconscious, memory, language, all the understructure of creativity, are formed very early; for a doctor, that won't make problems, but for a novelist or a composer, leaving the place to which his imagination, his obsessions, and thus his fundamental themes are bound could make for a kind of ripping apart. He must mobilize all his powers, all his artists wiles, to turn the disadvantages of that situation to benefits.
[ ... ] Only returning to the native land after a long absence can reveal the substantial strangeness of the world and of existence. — Milan Kundera

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost. — Milan Kundera

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?
You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more — Milan Kundera

It was the incommunicable scent of this country, its intangible essence, that she had brought along with her to France. — Milan Kundera

The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia. — Milan Kundera

Until then her view of time was the present moving forward and devouring the future; she either feared its swiftness (when she was awaiting something difficult) or rebelled at its slowness (when she was awaiting something fine). Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past. She sees a young man disconnecting himself from her life and going away, forevermore out of her reach. Mesmerized, all she can do is watch this piece of her life move off; all she can do is watch it and suffer. She is experiencing a brand-new feeling called nostalgia. — Milan Kundera

An old villa surrounded by a garden looked to them like the image of a comforting home, the dream of an idyll long past. — Milan Kundera

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. — Milan Kundera

In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine. — Milan Kundera

He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient toward his own life. But that didn't help: he took no pleasure in looking back, and he did it as seldom as possible. — Milan Kundera