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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.

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
Thinking
Situation
Discovered
Like
Woman
Sentences
People
Born
Basic
Else
Essential
Nutshell
Character
Essentials
Containing
Human
Thinks
Sentence
Humans
Characters
Metaphor
Something
Possibility
Author

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
Milan Kundera
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
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she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
Milan Kundera
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
Milan Kundera
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The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.
Milan Kundera
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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
Milan Kundera
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
Milan Kundera
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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How goodness heightens beauty!
Milan Kundera
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Milan Kundera
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
Milan Kundera
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
Milan Kundera
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan Kundera
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
Milan Kundera