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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

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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Now time has a very different look it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.
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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.
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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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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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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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Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.
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We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.
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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
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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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Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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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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The Greek word for return is nostos. Algos means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.
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When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.
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We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.
Milan Kundera