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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.

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
Past
Cutting
Persons
Source
Hunched
Person
Present
Slowness
Nothing
Focus
Fragment
Men
Freedom
Freed
Time
Future
Motorcycle
Fear
Fragments
Inspirational
Caught

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
Milan Kundera
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
Milan Kundera
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Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled on the contrary in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.
Milan Kundera
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
Milan Kundera
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
Milan Kundera
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I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.
Milan Kundera
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
Milan Kundera
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In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.
Milan Kundera
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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
Milan Kundera
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Believe me, nothing is more beautiful than to carry out crazy ideas. I'd like my whole life to be one single crazy idea.
Milan Kundera
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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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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan Kundera
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It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
Milan Kundera
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
Milan Kundera