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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
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University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Faces
Many
Real
Men
Perfectly
Honest
More quotes by Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
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
The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
Milan Kundera
And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
Milan Kundera
The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Milan Kundera
Optimism is the opium of the people.
Milan Kundera
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
It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
Milan Kundera
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
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
Milan Kundera
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
Milan Kundera
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!
Milan Kundera
Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
Milan Kundera
