Vanja > Vanja's Quotes

“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

“I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.”
― Virginia Woolf

“They lie deadly that tell you have good faces.”
― William Shakespeare, Coriolanus

“what cannot be saved when fate takes, patience her injury a mockery makes”
― William Shakespeare, Othello

“The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.”
― Anna Akhmatova

“You were lonely.
Before you met me.
When you met me.
You were alone.
You were a lonely child.
Your parents left you to yourself.
You never said it but
when I held you in my arms I could feel it.
I see now.
I thought you were strong.
You’re not.
Neither am I.”
― David Harrower, Blackbird

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness…I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recently mended […]”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
― Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa

“Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

“For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.”
― Franz Kafka

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre