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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.

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
Time
Existence
Novelists
Light
Novels
May
Cease
Human
Thus
Humans
Discovery
Radiates
Great
Forgotten
Astonish
Never
However
Perpetually
Men
Novel
Discoveries

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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.
Milan Kundera
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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
Milan Kundera
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
Milan Kundera
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
Milan Kundera
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
Milan Kundera
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
Milan Kundera
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Milan Kundera
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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
Milan Kundera
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
Milan Kundera
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
Milan Kundera