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Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.

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
Merely
Intelligent
Born
Away
Find
Right
Exile
Absolutes
Absolute

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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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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 How can anyone state categorically that a thought he once had is no longer valid?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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La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.
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Mankind's real moral test, a test so radical and so deep that it escapes our gaze, is probably the one of its relations with those that are the most at its mercy the Animals.
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To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science , instantly fades away.
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Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.
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She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.
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Only the most naive of questions are truly serious.
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What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.
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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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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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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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Nothing is more repugnant to me than brotherly feelings grounded in the common baseness people see in one another.
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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.
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For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.
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Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
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