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The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

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
Apathetic
Shouting
Masters
Future
Past
Change
Reason
People

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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.
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Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.
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Even in the game there lurks a lack of freedom even in a game is a trap for the players.
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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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I think, therefore I am' is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!
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There is no perfection only life
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
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No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes it knows no development.
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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 ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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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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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
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Nudity is the uniform of the other side... nudity is a shroud.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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