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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.

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
Novelists
Reader
Question
Teach
World
Comprehend
Novelist
Teaches

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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I have a strong will to love you for eternity.
Milan Kundera
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
Milan Kundera
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
Milan Kundera
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The pressure to make public retractions of past statements - there's something medieval about it. What does it mean, anyway, to 'retract' what you've said? How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid? In modern times an idea can be refuted, yes, but not retracted.
Milan Kundera
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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
Milan Kundera
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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
Milan Kundera
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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
Milan Kundera
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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.
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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Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.
Milan Kundera
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The purpose of the poetry is not to dazzle us with an astonishing thought, but to make one moment of existence unforgettable and worthy of unbearable nostalgia.
Milan Kundera
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Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
Milan Kundera