Leon Hyacinthus > Leon's Quotes

“Love isn't truly the body. Love is freedom to roam the heart and mind of the beloved.”
― Colleen McCullough, The Song of Troy

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished.”
― Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony

“Tell me the story..
About how the sun loved the moon so much..
That she died every night..
Just to let him breathe...”
― Hanako Ishii

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
" Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.”
― Alexandre Dumas

“The memory of my name will last longer than the lives of many men.”
― Colm Tóibín, House of Names

“You must live with what you did,’ Leander said. ‘What you did is all you have.”
― Colm Tóibín, House of Names

“Murder makes us ravenous, fills the soul with satisfaction that is fierce and then luscious enough to create a taste for further satisfaction.”
― Colm Tóibín, House of Names

“He stopped going to his own bed, waiting instead until Leander was ready for bed and then going to the room with him, the dog once more in his wake. He began to look forward to the night, to what happened between them in these hours, and to the morning when they woke.”
― Colm Tóibín, House of Names

“We live in a strange time,’ Electra said. ‘A time when the gods are fading. Some of us still see them but there are times when we don’t. Their power is waning. Soon, it will be a different world. It will be ruled by the light of day. Soon it will be a world barely worth inhabiting. You should feel lucky that you were touched by the old world, that in that house it brushed you with its wings.”
― Colm Tóibín, House of Names

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“SOLIDAO, LONELINESS.
What is it that we call loneliness. It can't simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? ... it isn't only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what? What on earth?”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Isn't it true that it's not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.”
― Claire Keegan

“— Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.”
― Claire Keegan, Foster

“I will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of tomorrow's rain by the rustle in the sycamores.”
― Claire Keegan, Antarctica

“Even in times of the most entrenched rationalism, there lives in every man a little Alexander who never managed to conquer his Eudaimon Arabia.”
― Thorkild Hansen, Arabia Felix The Danish Expedition