Milica > Milica's Quotes

“Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine, why should you number up my cups of tea?”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Vol 2

“   "But has anything happened to you? Your face is so strangely distorted."
   "No, I'm smiling," he said. "This is going to be my way of smiling. I want this grimace to be my hallmark.”
― Knut Hamsun, Victoria

“What have you done to your eyes? They’re all red. Have you been crying?’ ‘No,’ he answers, laughing, ‘but I’ve been staring into my fairy tales, where the sun is very strong.”
― Knut Hamsun, Victoria

“I am sure there are things that can't be cured by a good bath but I can't think of one.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn't know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can't always take the analytical position.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“I liked to sit in the library to write essays, allowing my sense of time and personal identity to dissolve as the light dimmed outside the windows.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends

“All these years, they’ve been like two little plants sharing the same plot of soil, growing around one another, contorting to make room, taking certain unlikely positions.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Ogledajući se ne-skrivena u njegovim očima, duša nije bila sebi stranac i neprijatelj, već neko sa kim se mogu pomiriti i koga mogu prihvatiti. Jer je on umeo da je prihvati.”
― Marija Jovanović, Spletkarenje sa sopstvenom dušom

“Wonderful music like this was the worst hurt there could be. The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

“Koliko je samo lakše kada znaš tačno gde ideš. Koliko je samo lakše kad znaš kome ideš, u susret. Koliko je samo lakše. Koliko je samo lakše kad ipak ideš... i tek kad kreneš, prvo to noge osete, one se uvek obraduju što si krenuo, one uvek idu nekome”
― Srđan Valjarević, Dnevnik druge zime

“Sneg. Ogromne, krupne pahulje, koje se istope još u vazduhu. A one koje i negde padnu, nestanu. Ništa od njih ne ostane...Ali lepo izgledaju u vazduhu, dok padaju ka zemlji, bar to. I ako te to zanima, da jeste, mislim na tebe, ne zbog snega nego i inače. Onako.”
― Srđan Valjarević, Dnevnik druge zime

“She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself in order to give voice to what is outside him, two paths open: either write a book that could be the unique book, that exhausts the whole in its pages; or write all books, to pursue the whole through its partial images. The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total world revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that writing of all books, writing the books of all possible authors.

If I think I must write one book, all the problems of how this book should be and how it should not be block me and keep me from going forward. If, on the contrary, I think that I am writing a whole library, I feel suddenly lightened: I know that whatever I write will be integrated, contradicted, balanced, amplified, buried by the hundreds of volumes that remain for me to write.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.”
― Ali Smith, Winter

“They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them.”
― John Williams, Stoner