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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)

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
Free
Viewers
Art
Listeners
Encrusted
Work
Contact
Opaque
Time
Direct
Interpreted
Reader
Viewer
Theory
Prevents
Coming
Listener
Media
Noisy

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
Milan Kundera
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Milan Kundera
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
Milan Kundera
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
Milan Kundera
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But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
Milan Kundera
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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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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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There is no perfection only life
Milan Kundera
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
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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?
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.
Milan Kundera
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
Milan Kundera