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what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.

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
Ten
Older
Meant
Weak
Asked
Nothing
Matter
Twenty
Years
Twenties

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The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
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we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
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The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
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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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The beauty of New York is unintentional it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
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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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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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