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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

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
Dissolution
Unbearable
Nostalgia
Sunset
Guillotine
Everything
Illuminated
Even
Aura
Auras
Lightness

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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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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.
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...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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To die to decide to die that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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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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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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