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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
Shout
Saddest
Joy
Often
Rooftops

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
Milan Kundera
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Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
Milan Kundera
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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
Milan Kundera
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera
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We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.
Milan Kundera
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
Milan Kundera
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
Milan Kundera
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
Milan Kundera
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
Milan Kundera
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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
Milan Kundera
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Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Milan Kundera
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We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
Milan Kundera
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
Milan Kundera
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
Milan Kundera
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Speak truth to power.
Milan Kundera
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Milan Kundera