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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

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
Disruption
Incessant
Longing
Death
Order
Time
Life

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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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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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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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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[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 the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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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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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.
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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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The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
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