Quote

Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.

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
Rate
Chilly
Comfort
Afforded
Silence
Occur
Sort
Surrounded
Story
Tragic
Rather
Spite
Stories
Variety
Comic

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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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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.
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I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
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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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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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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
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