Djali > Djali's Quotes

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“You are in every line I have ever read.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The lovely flowers
embarrass me.
They make me regret
I am not a bee...”
― Emily Dickinson

“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
― E.E. Cummings

“«Io ho pochissimi amici, forse nessuno di veramente intimo. Ho delle conoscenze, dei ragazzi e delle ragazze come me, la mia amica che ti parlò ieri al telefono, per esempio, con i quali scherzo, ballo, studio, faccio i pettegolezzi, ci scambiamo le idee, facciamo gli scemi e le persone serie a seconda delle circostanze, ma dentro, dentro è diverso. Ci sono dei tasti che toccati una volta per conoscersi quali siamo, non si toccano più, non si va a fondo. Si resta amici, ma si sa che certi argomenti non si debbono più toccare. Ci si sopporta e stima a vicenda. Papà diceva: ci si aiuta a vivere. Guai se così non fosse. Ma l'amicizia, diceva papà, l'amicizia vera è un sentimento forte. È un volersi bene spietato, un guardarsi continuamente negli occhi...»”
― Vasco Pratolini, Un eroe del nostro tempo

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Da mio padre avevo imparato, molto tempo dopo avere smesso di seguirlo sui sentieri, che in certe vite esistono montagne a cui non è possibile tornare. Che nelle vite come la mia e la sua non si può tornare alla montagna che sta al centro di tutte le altre, e all'inizio della propria storia. E che non resta che vagare per le otto montagne per chi, come noi, sulla prima e più alta ha perso un amico.”
― Paolo Cognetti, Le otto montagne

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“And I think about all the things we could be
if we were never told our bodies were not built for them.”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Every person needs to take one day away.  A day in which one consciously separates the past from the future.  Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.  Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for.  Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“Sì: vi sono alcuni che necessariamente smarriscono la strada, poiché per loro non esiste una strada giusta.”
― Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Une bibliothèque est une chambre d'amis.”
― Tahar Ben Jelloun, Éloge de l'amitié: La soudure fraternelle

“Forse non ci sono giorni della nostra adolescenza vissuti con altrettanta pienezza di quelli che abbiamo creduto di trascorrere senza averli vissuti, quelli passati in compagnia del libro prediletto. Tutto ciò che li riempiva agli occhi degli altri e che noi evitavamo come un ostacolo volgare a un piacere divino: il gioco che un amico veniva a proporci proprio nel punto più interessante, l’ape fastidiosa o il raggio di sole che ci costringevano ad alzare gli occhi dalla pagina o a cambiare posto, la merenda che ci avevano fatto portar dietro e che lasciavamo sul banco lì accanto senza toccarla, mentre il sole sopra di noi diminuiva di intensità nel cielo blu, la cena per la quale si era dovuti rientrare e durante la quale non abbiamo pensato ad altro che a quando saremmo tornati di sopra a finire il capitolo interrotto[...]”
― Marcel Proust, Del piacere di leggere

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
― Philippe Ariès

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“This is the sound of a revolution. We are coming, and we are ready.”
― Mandy Beaumont, The Furies

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
― Oliver Sacks