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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

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
Knowing
Giving
Love
Misleading
Mislead
Illusion
Gives
Emotion

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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.
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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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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
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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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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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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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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
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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.
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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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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.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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