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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Perishing
Quantity
Madness
Words
Culture
Overproduction
Avalanche
Avalanches

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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
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You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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Sad company is bad company.
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
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Leroy interrupted Chantal's fantasies: Freedom? As you live our your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom. You're free to melt your own individuality into the cauldron of the multitude either with a feeling of defeat or euphoria.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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