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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

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
Allow
Memories
Future
Must
Never
Collapse
Burden
Memory

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I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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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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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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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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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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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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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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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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