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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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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Soul
Knew
Men
Moment
Responds
Love
Voice
Resist
Woman
Terrified
Born
Forth
Moments
Thus
Happens
Calling
Cannot
Whose

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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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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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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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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.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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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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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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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.
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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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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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
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