Marquel Patton > Marquel's Quotes

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“Close, close all night
the lovers keep.
They turn together
in their sleep,

Close as two pages
in a book
that read each other
in the dark.

Each knows all
the other knows,
learned by heart
from head to toes.”
― Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

“If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings. ”
― Elizabeth Bishop

“Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)”
― Elizabeth Bishop

“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov , Speak, Memory

“...that swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born...”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory and a slippery hold.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

“Time was passing like a hand waving from a train I wanted to be on.
I hope you never have to think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― jonathan safran foer

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”
― Stephen King

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't.”
― Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”
― Stephen King

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
― Albert Camus, The Rebel

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting