Anant > Anant's Quotes

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”
― Svetlana Aleksievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“But I'll add, that there is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.”
― Eric Berne

“If you have ever, sir, been through a breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh as if seen for the first time then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.”
― Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“What hath night to do with sleep?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Every now and then I like to do as I'm told, just to confuse people.”
― Tamora Pierce, Melting Stones

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind

“The sea loved the moon
When she was supposed to love the shore.

The moon knew
And hence made his intentions known.

That she should love the shore
Who was destined for her.

Yet his protests seemed weak.
And even when he pushed her towards the shore-
She always retreated back.

To want, to need, to love the moon
For all she's worth.

Everyone said, it wasn't meant to happen.
Yet, the Tsunami rose that night for their union.”
― Saiber, Stardust and Sheets

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“A library is infinity under a roof.”
― Gail Carson Levine

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning. ”
― Louis L'Amour

“Seeing someone read a book you love is seeing a book recommend a person.”
― Reddit user coolstoryreddit

“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
― Novalis

“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
― Anais Nin

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“ ‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.”
― François Mauriac

“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
― Toni Morrison

“Distance was a dangerous thing, she knew. Distance changed people.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“We all need someone to look at us. we can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. the first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. the second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. they are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. they are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. this happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. people in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. one day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. and finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. they are the dreamers.”
― Milan Kundera

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”
― V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State

“‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs. With futility, we cling to the old wallet long after it has fallen apart. We visit and revisit the old neighborhood where we grew up, searching for the remembered grove of trees and the little fence. We clutch our old photographs. In our churches and synagogues and mosques, we pray to the everlasting and eternal. Yet, in every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away. All that we see around us, including our own bodies, is shifting and evaporating and one day will be gone. Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?”
― Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew