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f8173f1
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When you sit face to face with someone who is pleasant, respectful, and polite, you have hard time reminding yourself that nothing he says is true/sincere.
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Milan Kundera |
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cd8e1c6
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True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
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milan-kundera
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Milan Kundera |
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c8409c7
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It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
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Milan Kundera |
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2e7c820
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Laughter, on the other hand, " Petrarch went on, "is an explosion that tears us away from the world and throws us back into our own cold solitude. Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry. That's why I tell you yet again, and you want to keep in mind: Boccaccio doesn't understand love. Love can never be laughable. Love has nothing in common with laughter."
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Milan Kundera |
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2d6eda0
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But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.
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Milan Kundera |
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05c467f
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But was it love? The feeling of wanting to die beside her was clearly exaggerated: he had seen her only once before in his life! Was it simply the hysteria of a man, who, aware deep down of his inaptitude for love, felt the self-deluding need to simulate it?
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Milan Kundera |
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fcfe82b
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But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)
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Milan Kundera |
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a18c060
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Today I know this: when it comes time to take stock, the most painful wound is that of broken friendships; and there is nothing more foolish than to sacrifice a friendship to politics.
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politics
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Milan Kundera |
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4b91f9c
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Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)"
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Milan Kundera |
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388e94d
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vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.
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milan-kundera
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Milan Kundera |
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ca4a3e4
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What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure... To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
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Milan Kundera |
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dc0cf76
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Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?
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Milan Kundera |
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8409a0d
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The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centrism.
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Milan Kundera |
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e260198
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Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety. At any rate that afforded me some comfort.
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Milan Kundera |
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573762a
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Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.
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Milan Kundera |
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cdf2cf1
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A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to ..
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Milan Kundera |
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7c310eb
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yfqd l`lm shffyth shyy'an fshyy'an, ySbH ktyman w`Syan `l~ lfhm, yhw~ fy lmjhwl, bynm yhrb lnsn ldhy khnh l`lm, l~ dkhl nfsh, l~ Hnynh, l~ 'Hlmh, l~ thwrth, fl y`wd bmknh sm` l'Swt lty tsy'lh mn lkhrj b`d 'n 'SamaWhu lSwtu l'lym ldhy yrtf` fy dkhlh
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ميلان
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Milan Kundera |
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fbcf7f7
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Our lives may be separate, but they run in the same direction, like parallel lines.
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Milan Kundera |
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833198d
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she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.
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Milan Kundera |
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8e966ac
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All this time he was sitting up in bed and looking at the woman who was lying beside him and holding his hand in her sleep. He felt an ineffable love for her. Her sleep must have been very light at the moment because she opened her eyes and gazed up at him questioningly. "What are you looking at?" she asked. He knew that instead of waking her he should lull her back to sleep, so he tried to come up with an answer that would plant the image..
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Milan Kundera |
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d000bda
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The ludicrous element in our feeling does not make them any less authentic.
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feelings
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Milan Kundera |
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1c00f02
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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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truth
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Milan Kundera |
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920f35b
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Revolution in Love'. Can you tell me what you mean by that? Do you want free love as against bourgeois marriage, or monogamy as against bourgeois promiscuity?
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marriage
love
promiscuity
monogamy
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Milan Kundera |
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c1d8f01
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Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.
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Milan Kundera |
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d9c5d4f
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She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.
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sex
relationships
love
image
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Milan Kundera |
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4634245
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Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gi..
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Milan Kundera |
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c68da8b
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For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
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Milan Kundera |
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4015796
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En griego, <> se dice nostos. Algos significa "sufrimiento". La nostalgia es, pues, el sufrimiento causado por el deseo incumplido de regresar. La mayoria de los europeos puede emplear para esta nocion fundamental una palabra de origen griego (nostalgia) y, ademas, otras palabras con raices en la lengua nacional: en espanol decimos "anoranza"; en portugues, saudade. En cada lengua estas palabras poseen un matiz semantico distinto. ..
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Milan Kundera |
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032e78f
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Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.
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Milan Kundera |
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ff8bbde
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When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.
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marriage
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Milan Kundera |
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94903a2
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What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered."
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Milan Kundera |
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7004ea8
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They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with ..
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Milan Kundera |
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54ca08b
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The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything-- love, convictions, faith, histo..
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Milan Kundera |
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c6babb9
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We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap o..
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memory
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Milan Kundera |
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b44b87f
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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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Milan Kundera |
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298ca3a
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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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Milan Kundera |
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37ea4e2
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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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sensual
literary-fiction
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Milan Kundera |
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4d7d700
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The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)
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Milan Kundera |
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bd832a1
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'n nHb 'Hdan shfq@ bh fhdh y`ny 'nn l nHbh Hqan
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Milan Kundera |
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5a92043
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When a private talk over a bottle of wine is broadcast on the radio, what can it mean but that the world is turning into a concentration camp?
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Milan Kundera |
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8e9cc3d
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Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.
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Milan Kundera |
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16053d9
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Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
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Milan Kundera |
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c1a10de
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Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing."
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Milan Kundera |
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0c5af50
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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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Milan Kundera |