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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.

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
Matter
Shame
Feel
Choice
Must
Personal
Feels
Mistake
Seen
Ignominy
Choices
Humiliation
Everyone
Basis
Without
Bases

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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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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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