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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.

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
Mean
Removed
Later
Realize
Present
Realizing
Blindfolds
Understand
Blindfold
Means
Blindfolded
Past
Examine

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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.
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Only animals were not expelled from Paradise.
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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Kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.
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We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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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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For existential mathematics, which does not exist, would probably propose this equation: the value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.
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...he took a look at the blond girl's eyes and knew that he must not take part in the rigged game in which the ephemeral passes for the eternal and the small for the big, that he must not take part in the rigged game called love.
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Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.
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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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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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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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Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.
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Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.
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