Quote

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!

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
Together
Tears
Lightness
Firsts
Mankind
Succession
First
Second
Unbearable
Children
Says
Tear
Causes
Quick
Nice
Grass
Running
Flow
Two
Moved
Kitsch

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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.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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...no one can do a thing about feelings, they exist and there's no way to censor them. We can reproach ourselves for some action, for a remark, but not for a feeling, quite simply because we have no control at all over it.
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
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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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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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How goodness heightens beauty!
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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.
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