Quote

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

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
Ends
Seeing
Limited
Light
Passion
Longing
Mean
Politics
Extremes
Veiled
Life
Living
Total
Blinds
Strong
Meant
Distaste
Death
Darkness
Extremism
Art
Beyond
Motivated
Two
Perhaps
Borders

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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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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
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Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.
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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
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Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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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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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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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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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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