Love Quote by Milan Kundera

Kundera comes in sideways, smuggling a warning inside a love story: the first threat to intimacy is language itself. “Metaphors are dangerous” reads like an overreaction until he ties it to romance’s origin myth. Love doesn’t begin with knowledge of another person; it begins with a substitution. One image stands in for a whole human being, and the mind, delighted by its own poetry, starts treating the stand-in as the real thing.

The second sentence sharpens the blade. A metaphor isn’t decoration here; it’s the ignition system. By the time “a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory,” we’re already halfway into fiction. That “first word” is doing a lot of covert work: it suggests an arbitrary trigger (a phrase, a gesture, a private joke) that gets embalmed in memory and replayed until it becomes destiny. Kundera’s subtext is almost clinical: we fall in love not only with a person, but with the narrative apparatus we build to hold them.

The gendered framing is also telling. The woman “enters” a man’s “poetic memory,” implying a lover absorbed as material for art - an old literary imbalance where the beloved becomes muse, not co-author. It’s not necessarily misogyny so much as confession: the writer’s temptation to convert life into metaphor, then suffer when life refuses to behave like literature.

Contextually, it fits Kundera’s lifelong suspicion of lyricism and grand sentiment. In his world, metaphors don’t just prettify; they recruit. They make us loyal to an image, and that loyalty can outlast the truth.