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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

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
Well
German
Life
Lived
Says
Happened
Happens
Live
Tomas
Wells
Adage
Might
Adages

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
Milan Kundera
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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
Milan Kundera
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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
Milan Kundera
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
Milan Kundera
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We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
Milan Kundera
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
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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?
Milan Kundera
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
Milan Kundera
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
Milan Kundera
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Milan Kundera
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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
Milan Kundera
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
Milan Kundera
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Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
Milan Kundera