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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 How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid?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.

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
Thought
Longer
Retract
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Medieval
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Make
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More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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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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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Milan Kundera
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
Milan Kundera
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
Milan Kundera
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
Milan Kundera
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
Milan Kundera
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
Milan Kundera
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
Milan Kundera
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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
Milan Kundera
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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