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

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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
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People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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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.
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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
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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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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
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Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other.
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