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Happiness is the longing for repetition.

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
Unbearable
Repetition
Longing
Laughter
Joy
Happiness
Lightness

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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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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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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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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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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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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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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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There is no perfection only life
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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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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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How goodness heightens beauty!
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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