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No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

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
Really
Painting
Sonatas
Novel
Pianos
Getting
Percussion
Help
Ninth
White
Album
Helping
Piano
Two
Drunk
Music
Albums
Sonata

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Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
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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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In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colourful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles... no matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, even in Hitler's time, even in Stalin's time.
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But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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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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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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it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.
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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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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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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.
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The moment Kafka attracts more attenetion than Joseph K., Kafka's posthumous death begins.
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.
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I am not in favor of imposing happiness on people. Everyone has a right to his bad wine, to his stupidity, and to his dirty fingernails.
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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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a man possessed with peace is always smiling
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But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?
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