Quote

No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.

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
Movement
Mockery
Change
Rust
Great
Touches
World
Ridicule
Designed
Laughed
Bear
Belittled
Bears
Corrodes

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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.
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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.
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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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Is not parody the eternal lot of man?
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When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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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.
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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.
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Sad company is bad company.
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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