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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
Joking
Barrier
Barriers
Poetry
Enemy
Men
Love
World
Laughable

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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
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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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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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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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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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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
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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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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
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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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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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