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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.

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
Strong
Enough
Lightness
Unbearable
Weak
Leave
Hurt

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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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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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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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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
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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?
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The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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