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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.

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
Cannot
Anything
Take
Gentlemen
Men
Ladies
Life
Gentleman
Seriously
Anyone
Lives

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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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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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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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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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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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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
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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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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
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Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?
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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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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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