"Only animals were not expelled from Paradise."
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Milan Kundera quotes (page 6 of 21)
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"She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness."
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"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
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"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
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"Suspending moral judgment is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil."
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"Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo."
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"My lifelong ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form."
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"There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant."
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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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"The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas."
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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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"A man is responsible for his ignorance."
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"Eroticism is like a dance: one always leads the other."
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"Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders."
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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."
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"The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it."
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"Metaphors are dangerous. Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory."
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"I want you to be weak. As weak as I am."
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"You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue."
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"Listening to a news broadcast is like smoking a cigarette and crushing the butt in the ashtray."
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