Quote

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.

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
Pain
Lightness
Someone
Unbearable
Nothing
Compassionate
Feels
Empathy
Even
Heavy
Intensified
Compassion
Weighs
Hundred
Prolonged
Imagination
Heavier

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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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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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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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To laugh is to live profoundly.
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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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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
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