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

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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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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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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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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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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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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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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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