Quote

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.

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
Save
Probe
Questions
Lightness
Short
Additional
Cutting
Unbearable
Effects
Test
Perhaps
Measure
Asks
Tests
Love
Effect

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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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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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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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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.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to 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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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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