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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

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
Means
Easy
Truth
Doe
Live
Negatively
Enough
Hiding
Mean
Putting
Lying

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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
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Yes, it's a well-known fact about you: you're like death, you take everything.
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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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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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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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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