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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.
Milan Kundera
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Milan Kundera
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: April 1
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Novelist
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Poet
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University Teacher
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BrĂ¼nn
Poetry
Existence
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Dazzle
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Unforgettable
Moments
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Astonishing
Make
Nostalgia
Worthy
More quotes by Milan Kundera
loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
Milan Kundera
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
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.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
Milan Kundera
Happiness is the longing for repetition.
Milan Kundera
Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
Milan Kundera
Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
Milan Kundera
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!
Milan Kundera
But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
Milan Kundera
Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood.
Milan Kundera
This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite novelistic to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as fictive, fabricated, and untrue to life into the word novelistic. Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fas
Milan Kundera
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
Milan Kundera
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
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.
Milan Kundera
But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera
Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
Milan Kundera
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.
Milan Kundera