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

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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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Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world. But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.
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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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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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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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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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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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The history of music is mortal, but the idiocy of the guitar is eternal.
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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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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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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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