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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
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Poet
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University Teacher
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BrĂ¼nn
Memory
Memories
Slowness
Forget
Proportional
Forgetting
Intensity
Degree
Speed
Degrees
More quotes by Milan Kundera
The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
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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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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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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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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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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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