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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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Novelist
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University Teacher
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Brünn
Love
Franz
Renouncing
Softly
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Ever
Mean
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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Sad company is bad company.
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The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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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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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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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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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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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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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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