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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
Humans
Purview
Excludes
Kitsch
Unacceptable
Essentially
Existence
Human
Everything

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To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.
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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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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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To die to decide to die that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
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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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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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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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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
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Fidelity gives a unity to lives that would otherwise splinter into thousands of split-second impressions.
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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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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter, and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.
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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.
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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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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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