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

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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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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
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The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the future out of mind, you can forget your worries.
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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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I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect the value of all values.
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All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.
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Ah, ladies and gentlemen, a man lives a sad life when he cannot take anything or anyone seriously.
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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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...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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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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It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life -- and herein lies its secret -- takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.
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How goodness heightens beauty!
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... characters are not born like people, of woman they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
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The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
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Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
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Sad company is bad company.
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He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
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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.
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On the surface, an intelligible lie underneath, the unintelligible truth.
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