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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
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Brünn
Existence
Purpose
Dazzle
Moment
Unforgettable
Moments
Unbearable
Thought
Astonishing
Make
Nostalgia
Worthy
Poetry

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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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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To laugh is to live profoundly.
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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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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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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
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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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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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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.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor
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