Ρένα Λούνα > Ρένα's Quotes

“I am only thirty
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces – and as it gets older and stronger, it will tear deeper – love her, love her, love her!”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
― Mark Twain

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

“Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“Maybe there is a beast… maybe it's only us.”
― William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“Yes - I've learned from my mistakes, and I'm sure I could repeat them perfectly.”
― Jonathan Coe, The Closed Circle

“When I think back about my immediate reaction to that redheads girl, it seems to spring from an appreciation of natural beauty. I mean the heart pleasure you get from looking at speckled leaves or the palimpsested bark of plane trees in Provence. There was something richly appealing to her color combination, the ginger snaps floating in the milk-white skin, the golden highlights in the strawberry hair. it was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes

“Why should I fear death?
If I am, then death is not.
If Death is, then I am not.
Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.
Religious tyranny did domineer.
At length the mighty one of Greece
Began to assent the liberty of man.”
― Epicurus

“Put out my eyes, and I can see you still;
slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet;
and without any feet can go to you;
and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.
Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you
and grasp you with my heart as with a hand;
arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true;
and if you set this brain of mine afire,
upon my blood I then will carry you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours

“Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
― Franz Kafka

“I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“What am I doing here in this endless winter?”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“A book is a suicide postponed.”
― Cioran

“Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
― Jean Cocteau

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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

“The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by “too literary”? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?

SIMENON

Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.”
― Georges Simenon

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace