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a man possessed with peace is always smiling

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
Smiling
Possessed
Peace
Always
Men

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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Yes, if you're looking for infinity, just close your eyes!
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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Speak truth to power.
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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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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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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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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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