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

More quotes by Milan Kundera

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To die to decide to die that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.
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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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There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.
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Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.
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The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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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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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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In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.
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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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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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Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.
Milan Kundera
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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.
Milan Kundera
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The man hunched over his motorcycle can focus only on the present... he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear.
Milan Kundera
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The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.
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She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
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Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue - perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.
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The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
Milan Kundera