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

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
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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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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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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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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure.
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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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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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.
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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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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
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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.
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