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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.

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
Looks
Captured
Different
Carried
Time
Conquer
Longer
Present
Future
Conquering
Past
Capturing
Look
Conquered

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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case animals have the right to a merciful death.
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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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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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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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There is no perfection only life
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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
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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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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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We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
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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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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
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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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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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