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Milan Kundera Quotes
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The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
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Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, ahistorical accidents, soon forgotten.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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For there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.
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Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.
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Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.
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Since the insignificance of all things is our lot, we should not bear it as an affliction but learn to enjoy it.
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He felt as if she no longer existed for him, had gone off somewhere, into some other life where, if he should meet her, he would no longer recognize her.
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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?
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This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other.
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Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.
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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
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"Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."
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The gaze of a man has often been described. It seems to fasten coldly on the woman, as if it were measuring, weighing, evaluating, choosing her, as if, in other words, it were turning her into a thing.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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It is always that way: between the moment he meets her again and the moment he recognizes her for the woman he loves, he has some distance to go.
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Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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The moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.
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Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.
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Quote of the day
The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.
Mary Shelley
Milan Kundera
Creative Commons
Born:
April 1, 1929
(age 94)
Bio:
Milan Kundera is a Czech-born writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981.
Known for:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
The Joke (1967)
Life Is Elsewhere (1969)
The Festival of Insignificance (2013)
Most used words:
kitsch
life
love
human
man
woman
true
reason
people
existence
person
question
totalitarian
eye
novel
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