The Joke Quotes.

1. "I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

2. "Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed. The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting. No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

3. "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, The Joke

4. "Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

5. "Do stories, apart from happening, being, have something to say? For all my skepticism, some trace of irrational superstition did survive in me, the strange conviction, for example, that everything in life that happens to me also has a sense, that it means something, that life speaks to us about itself through its story, that it gradually reveals a secret, that it takes the form of a rebus whose message must be deciphered, that the stories we live compromise the mythology of our lives and in that mythology lies the key to truth and mystery. Is it an illusion? Possibly, even probably, but I can’t rid myself of the need continually to decipher my own life."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

6. "It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape. After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

7. "Optimism is the opium of the people."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

8. "...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)"
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

9. "But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)"
- Milan Kundera, The Joke

10. "A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself."
- Milan Kundera, The Joke