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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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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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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.
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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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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
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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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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Milan Kundera