Quote

Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.

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
Giving
Splits
Would
Thousands
Impression
Unity
Splinter
Otherwise
Splinters
Second
Impressions
Gives
Fidelity
Lives
Split

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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
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A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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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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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.
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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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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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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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[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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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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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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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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