Quote

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.

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
Person
Intense
Amazing
Illuminate
Darkness
Beam
Single
Multitude
Others
Multitudes
Light
Jealousy
Power
Keeping
Persons
Total

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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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The border between good and evil is terribly fuzzy.
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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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Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)
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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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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
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The young man called the waiter and paid. Then he got up and said to the girl: 'We're going.' Where to?' The girl feigned surprise. Don't ask, just come on,' said the young man. Is that any way to talk to me?' It's the way I talk to whores.
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
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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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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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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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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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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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