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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

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I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them I have nothing in common with them.
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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.
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Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.
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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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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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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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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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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.
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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
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There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
Milan Kundera