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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.

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
Library
Couldn
Sort
Hurt
Books
Emblems
Secret
Regarded
Book
Brotherhood
Men
Possibly

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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
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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 great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
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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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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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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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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
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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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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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