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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.

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
Amount
Voice
Left
Irresistible
Time
Vast
Calling
Behinds
Return
Behind

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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.
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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
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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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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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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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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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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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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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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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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's very beautiful. But what would they nourish their intimate talk with? However contemptible the world may be, they still need it to be able to talk together.
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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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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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