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In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.

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
Given
Preclude
Kitsch
Totalitarian
Realm
Realms
Advance
Questions
Answers

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The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.
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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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Tell me, where in life is there a value that would make us consider suicide uncalled for on principle! Love? Or friendship? I guarantee that friendship is not a bit less fickle than love and it is impossible to build anything on it. Self-love? I wish it were possible.
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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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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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Beauty has long since disappeared. It has slipped beneath the surface of the noise, the noise of words, sunk deep as Atlantis. The only thing left of it is the word, whose meaning loses clarity from year to year.
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And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.
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Optimism is the opium of the people.
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He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.
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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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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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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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At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.
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The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question.
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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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Why don't you ever use your strength on me? she said. Because love means renouncing strength, said Franz softly.
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...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)
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