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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.

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
Character
Novels
Prose
Possibilities
Equally
Circumvented
Borders
Horrified
Characters
Crossed
Possibility
Fond
Novel
Border

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We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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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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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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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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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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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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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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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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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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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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