Marko > Marko's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)”
― Voltaire

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
― Virginia Woolf

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
― Virginia Woolf

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“The real damage is done by those millions who want to 'survive.' The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
― Sophie Scholl

“I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed.”
― Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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

“Acts of injustice done
Between the setting and the rising sun
In history lie like bones, each one.”
― W.H. Auden

“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“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

“You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“In my old age, I see that life itself is often more fantastic and terrible than the stories we believed as children, and that perhaps there is no harm in finding magic among the trees.”
― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child

“Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“There is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be a quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like you may take me for one of those.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“feel what I feel within myself—that is trying to become aware of it also what I feel in others not being ashamed of my feeling, thoughts—or ideas realize the thing that they are—”
― Marilyn Monroe, Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Dolazi vrijeme malih pjesnika. Zbogom Vitmene, Dikinsonova, Froste. Dobrodošli vi čija slava nikad neće doprijeti dalje od vaše najbliže rodbine, i možda jednog ili dvojice dobrih prijatelja okupljenih poslije večere oko vrča jakog crnog vina... dok djeca padaju u san i žale se zbog buke koju pravite preturajući po ormanima, tražeći svoje stare pjesme, u strahu da ih je možda vaša žena izbacila prilikom posljednjeg proljetnog spremanja.

Pada snijeg, kaže neko ko je zavirio u mrklu noć, a potom se i on okreće ka vama dok se vi pripremate da čitate, ponešto teatralno, s licem koje crveni, dugačku ljubavnu pjesmu čija je posljednja strofa (vi to ne znate) beznadežno izgubljena.”
― Charles Simic

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“But each poetic world is not a pure invention, it is a possibility of nature.
Imagination is itself immanent in the real. It is not a state. It is human existence itself.”
― Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

“They lived and laughed and loved and left.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters

“I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.”
― Emile Zola

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928