Milan Kundera Quotes - Page 8

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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.

  Milan Kundera

  Rust, Movement, World

  Milan Kundera (1983). “The Joke”, Viking Press

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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.

  Milan Kundera

  Character, Thinking, People

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• Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Art, People, Imagination

  "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Series Seven". Book edited by George Plimpton, October 1, 1986.

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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)

  Milan Kundera

  Art, Media, Opaque

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• No act is of itself either good or bad. Only its place in the order of things makes it good or bad.

  Milan Kundera

  Order

  "The Joke". Book by Milan Kundera, 1967.

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• La memoria no guarda películas, guarda fotografías.

  Milan Kundera

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• To ensure that the self doesn't shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends.

  Milan Kundera

  Friendship, Memories, Flower

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• I think I am a much better actor than I have allowed myself to be.

  Milan Kundera

  Thinking, Actors

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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.

  Milan Kundera

  Sacrifice, Broken, Today

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• The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, War, People

  "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting". Book by Milan Kundera, 1979.

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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.

  Milan Kundera

  Tombstone, Flower, Garden

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• Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)

  Milan Kundera

  Men, Situations In Life, Return

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• No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.

  Milan Kundera

  Dog, Animal, Men

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• Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

  Milan Kundera

  Hero, Traps, Novel

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• If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join in the kill, the others will discreetly pretend to know nothing, hear nothing, so you can go right on seeing them and talking to them. That second category, discreet and tactful, those are your friends. 'Friends' in the modern sense of the term. Listen, Jean-Marc, I've known that forever.

  Milan Kundera

  Talking, Two, People

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• The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

  Milan Kundera

  Girl, Moving, Boys

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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• The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Book, People

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• God has been kind to dogs in no putting a sense of beauty into their heads.

  Milan Kundera

  Dog, Kind, Has Beens

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• Sensuality is the total mobilization of the senses: an individual observes his partner intently, straining to catch every sound.

  Milan Kundera

  Sound, Individual, Partners

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• nothing yet. I've been waiting." "for what?" she made no response. she could not tell him that she had been waiting for him.

  Milan Kundera

  Waiting, Made, Response

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• Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

  Milan Kundera

  Memories, Past, Track

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• Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

  Milan Kundera

  Courage, Law, Coincidence In Life

  "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". Book by Milan Kundera, 1984.

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• Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.

  Milan Kundera

  Drinking, Sky, Water

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• Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

  Milan Kundera

  Kitsch, Forgotten, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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• All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.

  Milan Kundera

  Games, Lovers, Rules Of The Game

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