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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.

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
Truly
Ones
Serious
Child
Children
Formulate
Even
Naive
Indeed
Questions

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what's the matter? he asked nothing what do you want me to do for you? i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am.
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[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.
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Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.
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Common European thought is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without translators, Europe would not exist translators are more important than members of the European Parliament.
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Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?
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Perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is, we demand something - love - from our partner instead of delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.
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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 love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.
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In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
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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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...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste.
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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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But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.
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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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... 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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Yes, it's crazy. Love is either crazy or it's nothing at all.
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Those who consider the Devil to be a partisan of Evil and angels to be warriors for Good accept the demagogy of the angels. Things are clearly more complicated.
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People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.
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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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He took over anger to intimidate subordinates, and in time anger took over him.
Milan Kundera