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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)

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
Rooftops
Shout
Saddest
Joy
Often

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
Milan Kundera
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For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Milan Kundera
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Milan Kundera
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
Milan Kundera
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
Milan Kundera
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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
Milan Kundera
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
Milan Kundera
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
Milan Kundera
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
Milan Kundera
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan Kundera
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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
Milan Kundera
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
Milan Kundera
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
Milan Kundera
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
Milan Kundera