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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

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
Unacceptable
Essentially
Existence
Human
Everything
Humans
Purview
Excludes
Kitsch

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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.
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The great European novel started out as entertainment, and every true novelist is nostalgic for it. In fact, the themes of those great entertainments are terribly serious-think of Cervantes!
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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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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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Sad company is bad company.
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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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.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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There is no perfection only life
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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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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists' discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
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Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
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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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