Quote

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.

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
Never
Dead
Accordingly
Men
Dies
Mortal
Experience
Grasp
Doesn
Mortals
Able
Behave
Human
Basic
Humans
Accept
Even
Accepting

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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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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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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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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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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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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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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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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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