Quote

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.

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
Like
Light
Correct
Best
Fill
Outline
Better
Compare
Outlines
Ever
Second
Invite
Live
Stay
Kick
Thing
Lives
Invites
Make
Place
Frightening
Life
Two
Kicks

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Sad company is bad company.
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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To die to decide to die that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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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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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 senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
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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 only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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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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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
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