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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

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
Enemy
Men
Love
World
Laughable
Joking
Barrier
Barriers
Poetry

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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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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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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.
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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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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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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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.
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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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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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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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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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.
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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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