Tatève > Tatève's Quotes

“You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for.”
― richard siken

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

“I love you, my sun, my life, I love your eyes-closed- all the little tails of your thoughts, your stretchy vowels, your whole soul from head to heels.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“This is how I lived back then– through books. I locked myself into their stories, dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as almost more real than the people around me, who spoke and lived in denial, destined, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.”
― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark

“I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it — and I'm sure I can't tell you whether the fate's good or evil. I don't die — I don't fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there.”
― E. M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread

“You do care a little for me, I know... but nothing to speak of, and you don't love me. I was yours once till death if you'd cared to keep me, but I'm someone else's now... and he's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life.”
― Maria Kodama

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.”
― Kouta Hirano

“I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“And I want to be held down. I don't know what to do with the horrifying freedom that can destroy me.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The order I found was the order of disorder”
― William Saroyan

“I took to writing at an early age to escape from meaninglessness, uselessness, unimportance, insignificance, poverty, enslavement, ill health, despair, madness, and all manner of other unattractive, natural and inevitable things.”
― William Saroyan, My Heart's in the Highlands

“I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?”
― William Saroyan, Short drive, sweet chariot

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.”
― Sylvia Plath

“What did my fingers do before they held him?
What did my heart do, with its love?

From " Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices", 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short time of space.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“We must feel everything, everything we can. We are here for that.”
― Henry James

“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“What is art? (...) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time