Quote

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

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
Longer
Dead
Differences
Covered
Whether
Graves
Doe
Soil
Make
Anyway
Stones
Difference

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under . . . The fourth category, the rarest, is the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers.
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To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
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...in our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
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Pain doesn't listen to reason, it has it's own reason, which is not reasonable
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What is unique about the I hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual I is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.
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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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The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
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The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it.
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Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
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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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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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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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How goodness heightens beauty!
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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.
Milan Kundera
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We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.
Milan Kundera
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
Milan Kundera
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The reign of imagagology begins where history ends.
Milan Kundera