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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

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
Rehearsal
Unbearable
Worth
Firsts
First
Life
Groundwork
Lightness

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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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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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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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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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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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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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It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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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.
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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