Quote

Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.

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
Language
Easily
Means
Ground
Persons
Childhood
Person
Walking
Without
High
Tightrope
Country
Friends
Afforded
Mean
Known
Colleagues
Family
Foreign

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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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.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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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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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
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As you live out your desolation, you can be either unhappy or happy. Having that choice is what constitutes your freedom.
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Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
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Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
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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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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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