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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
People
Apathetic
Shouting
Masters
Future
Past
Change
Reason

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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
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I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)
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And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
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what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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We go through the present blindfolded... Only later, when the blindfold is removed and we examine the past, do we realize what we've been through and understand what it means.
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Happiness is the longing for repetition.
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Remembering now all those farewells (fake farewells, worked-up farewells), Irena thinks: a person who messes up her goodbyes shouldn’t expect much from her re-unions.
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Immortality no longer interests the weary old man at all.
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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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Only a literary work that reveals an unknown fragment of human existence has a reason for being.
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The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
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Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.
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I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect the value of all values.
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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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Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.
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The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.
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The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.
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Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel it is its morality.
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But then he told himself: What does it really mean to be useful? Today's world, just as it is, contains the sum of the utility of all people of all times. Which implies: The highest morality consists in being useless.
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