SD > SD's Quotes

“Sendo imaterial, uma crença não é localizável como um conjunto de pedrinhas de coleção; é mais difícil ao homem encontrar aquilo que as religiões dizem que é uma parcela dele próprio, do que aquilo que é o oposto dele: um inimigo ou um segredo que está no mundo. Porque para o mundo consegue-se olhar. E se a percepção for colocada em instinto de caça, nenhum segredo resistirá ao apetite de conhecer, que por vezes no homem é repugnante porque não descansa.”
― Gonçalo M. Tavares, O Osso do Meio

“Maybe there was no perfect life for her, but somewhere, surely, there was a life worth living.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities. At the beginning of the game there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are 9 million variations after the first 6 moves. And those possibilities keep growing. So it gets very messy. And there is no way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living...never underestimate the big importance of small things.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically a part of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you're in.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn't necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“They testify to the desire to watch a body perform its rites: the same urge that is present in cruder form in Hariss's endless recording of people defecating or washing, sleeping or having sex; an urge that has itself subsequently flowered out in vast profusion on the internet, that kingdom of self-portraiture, that enclave of the fetishised and the banal. Surveillance art, I suppose you could call it, made before the term was even in circulation.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“If there is a current animating Warhol's work, it is not sexual desire, not eros as we generally understand it, but rather desire for attention: the driving force of the modern age.”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

“Il est en souvent ainsi dans la vie, ou l'attitude qu'on a avec une femme qu'on vient de rencontrer , les discussions qu'on peut avoir avec elle, et plus tard, qui sait, les tendres attentions et les caresses, et meme les querelles et les brouilles ulterieures, poursuivent ou completent, corrigent ou amendent, celles qu'on a eues avec un'autre femme, comme si, dans notre solipsisme invetere, c'etait toujours a une seule et meme femme, qui englobair toutes les femmes de notre vie, que nous nous adressions. (p.80)”
― Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Les émotions

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sadie, do you see this? This is a persimmon tree! This is my favorite fruit." Marx picked a fat orange persimmon from the tree, and he sat down on the now termite-free wooden deck, and he ate it, juice running down his chin. "Can you believe our luck?" Max said. "We bought a house with a tree that has my actual favorite fruit!"
Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had hey just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Camilo escrevia maus versos, mas os maus poetas sao em geral bons criticos; porque o que lhes impede a inspiracao e a propria impertinencia da justica.”
― Augustina Bessa Luis

“Travel unsettles the appropriate. You’re bound to be inappropriate. Which is probably why I don’t feel the intense embarrassment some do at not being able to speak foreign languages correctly. It seems to me that one of the privileges of travel is never to fit in. And not to fit in, not to be able to, is a kind of freedom. One of the freedoms that money can buy, like buying a hotel room in which one is psychologically unburdened and can act out guilty pleasures, capitalist ones, no doubt.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“Sometimes I think it’s my fate to meet more and more people and that if it weren’t, my life would be less chaotic. Virginia Woolf wrote that books continue each other and it seems to me that people continue each other too, spring ungodlike out of the heads and bodies of others, not clones but continuities, with ties that bind, loosely or closely. Some characters seem to fit better in some scenes than in others, have more to do with the space around them and the actors who preceded their appearance. Of course then there are the discontinuities…”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“ Compared with Europeans most of us don’t walk around bearing history’s daily weight, even though we’re weight-conscious. We don’t listen to history’s taunts. Even though they’re there. Old news isn’t supposed to linger in our streets or in our homes. We even have less of it, I’d things like history can be weighed and measured that may. Europeans may be size queens. If I defend myself, do I defend my country, as if it and I were the same, which begs the question of how and to what extent these things can be separated. Do I claim the country or does it claim me?" ”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“The rain persists, an amniotic fluid, the perfect environment for reading in a room, a womb of one’s own.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“Sometimes he's hopeful. He quotes Gransci: Optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. I might easily reverse the tow, I say, hoping that he'll enjoy the irony. He lights a cigar and peers at me as if we were sifting at different tables. "A joke?" he asks. "Sure", I say. Not mentioning paralysis of the will, the division of the intellect. "In Haiti" I tell him "there's a saying: When the anthropologists come, the gods leave". "That is too anti-intellctual for me", Zoran says, "but interesting. Anthropology is anyway a nineteen-century problem." "I can't think of one problem that isn't technological that doesn't go back at least to the nineteenth century." "Touche".”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“I can feel entirely indifferent to the content of what I say. A great postindustrial capitalist ennui engulfs me and sweeps away vestiges of involvement. Leaves me passionless and dissatisfied and incapable of movement. I'm threatened by this constantly. In unfamiliar surroundings, the point is to shift voices. I like shifting voices. Love affairs permit those shifts, and when the lover is shifty, as Zoran might be, the ride is bumpy.”
― Lynne Tillman, Motion Sickness

“The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“There’s time for everything except the things worth doing.”
― George Orwell, Coming Up for Air

“It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about are dead. We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working -hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that. Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste - but he's not capable of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week - well, next week is a long way off.”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“They don’t want to have a good time, they merely want to slump into middle age as quickly as possible. After the frightful battle of getting her man to the altar, the woman kind of relaxes, and all her youth, looks, energy, and joy of life just vanish overnight. It was like that with Hilda. Here was this pretty, delicate girl, who’d seemed to me—and in fact when I first knew her she was—a finer type of animal than myself, and within only about three years she’d settled down into a depressed, lifeless, middle-aged frump”
― George Orwell, Coming up for Air

“He was scared and he felt vulnerable and the last thing on earth he wanted was to try to make friends with these strangers. He wished with all his heart that Joyce were here with him. After all, it was always easier to meet new people if there were two of you. It gave you confidence and made you feel at ease. Look, it said to the world, I already have one friend so I can't be all that bad. And Joyce always made him feel like his best self anyway, so there would be no resisting him.”
― Mike Gayle, All the Lonely People