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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
Illusion
Gives
Emotion
Knowing
Giving
Love
Misleading
Mislead

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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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Sleep in my arms. Like a baby bird. Like a broom among brooms... in a broom closet. Like a tiny parrot. Like a whistle. Like a little song. A song sung by a forest... within a forest... a thousand years ago.
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Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
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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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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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