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

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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.
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A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
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No great movement designed to change the world can bear to be laughed at or belittled. Mockery is a rust that corrodes all it touches.
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Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo.
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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 How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid?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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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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And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
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The worst thing is not that the world is unfree, but that people have unlearned their liberty.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
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God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.
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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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If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening.
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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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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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