Arvand > Arvand's Quotes

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Sometimes not talking is effortless, and other times it’s more exhausting than lifting pianos.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I think that's the real loss of innocence: the first time you glimpse the boundaries that will limit your potential.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Regrets came up and asked me if I’d like to own them. Declined them for the most part but took a few just so I wouldn’t leave this relationship empty handed.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Or about how when you're a child, to stop you from following the crowd you're assaulted with the line "If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" but when you're an adult and to be different is suddenly a crime, people seem to be saying, "Hey. Everyone else is jumping off a bridge. Why aren't you?”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“People carry their secrets in hidden places, not on their faces. They carry suffering on their faces. Also bitterness if there’s room.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“I didn't think anyone who had to demand respect ever got it.”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
― Franz Kafka

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
― franz kafka

“Paths are made by walking”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Kafka, Franz

“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
― anthony burgess

“When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else's oppression, we'll find our opportunities to make real change.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.”
― Liane Moriarty, Truly Madly Guilty

“It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.”
― Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

“You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
― Roy T. Bennett

“I have realized; it is during the times I am far outside my element that I experience myself the most. That I see and feel who I really am, the most! I think that's what a comet is like, you see, a comet is born in the outer realms of the universe! But it's only when it ventures too close to our sun or to other stars that it releases the blazing "tail" behind it and shoots brazen through the heavens! And meteors become sucked into our atmosphere before they burst like firecrackers and realize that they're shooting stars! That's why I enjoy taking myself out of my own element, my own comfort zone, and hurling myself out into the unknown. Because it's during those scary moments, those unsure steps taken, that I am able to see that I'm like a comet hitting a new atmosphere: suddenly I illuminate magnificently and fire dusts begin to fall off of me! I discover a smile I didn't know I had, I uncover a feeling that I didn't know existed in me... I see myself. I'm a shooting star. A meteor shower. But I'm not going to die out. I guess I'm more like a comet then. I'm just going to keep on coming back.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living. Some of us, in time, become so conscious of it that we live harder, more obstinately, with more fury. Some need its constant presence to even be aware of its antithesis. Others become so preoccupied with it that they go into the waiting room long before it has announced its arrival. We fear it, yet most of us fear more than anything that it may take someone other than ourselves. For the greatest fear of death is always that it will pass us by. And leave us there alone.”
― Fredrik Backman, A Man Called Ove

“مردم همیشه شکایت می‌کنند که چرا کفش ندارن تا اینکه یه روز آدمی رو می‌بینن که پا نداره و بعد غر می‌زنن که چرا ویلچر اتوماتیک ندارن. چرا؟ چی باعث می‌شه که به طور ناخودآگاه خودشون رو از یه سیستم ملال‌آور به یکی دیگه پرت کنن؟ چرا اراده فقط معطوفه به جزئیات و نه کلیات؟ چرا به جای اینکه «کجا باید کار کنم؟» نمی‌گیم «چرا باید کار کنم؟» چرا به جای «چرا باید تشکیل خانواده بدم؟» می‌گیم «کی باید تشکیل خانواده بدم؟»”
― Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

“Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84