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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.

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
Remember
Goodbye
Persons
Fake
Mess
Person
Unions
Farewells
Much
Shouldn
Goodbyes
Thinking
Thinks
Messes
Expect
Farewell
Worked
Remembering

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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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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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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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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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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
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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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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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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.
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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
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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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we might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. he is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.
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