Milan Kundera Quote

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

Milan Kundera

There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

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About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (UK: KU(U)N-dər-ə; Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra] ; 1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country's ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was also a nominee for other awards.
Kundera was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.