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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
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Use
Means
Ever
Mean
Love
Franz
Renouncing
Softly
Strength

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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.
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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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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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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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