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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.

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
Long
Loses
Disappeared
Years
Since
Beneath
Beauty
Clarity
Year
Noise
Word
Surface
Words
Meaning
Atlantis
Left
Whose
Sunk
Thing
Deep
Slipped

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loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.
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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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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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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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The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
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When we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it.
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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.
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I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.
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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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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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Art arises from sources other than logic. (p.32)
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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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Business only has two functions - innovation and marketing.
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Isn't beer the holy libation of sincerity? The potion that dispels all hypocrisy, any charade of fine manners? The drink that does nothing worse than incite its fans to urinate in all innocence, to gain weight in all frankness?
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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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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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Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.
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