Areti > Areti's Quotes

“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”
― Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“No, you are not the nameless master of the world, the one on whom history had lost its hold, the one who no longer felt the rain falling, who did not see the approach of night. You are no longer the inaccessible, the limpid, the transparent one. You are afraid, you are waiting. You are waiting, on Place Clichy, for the rain to stop falling.”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“Te t'es arrêté à parler et seul le silence t'a répondu. Mais ces mots, ces milliers, ces millions de mots qui se sont arrêtés dans ta gorge, les mots sans suite, les cris de joie, les mots d'amour, les rires idiots, quand donc les retrouveras-tu?

Maintenant tu vis dans le terreur du silence. Mais n'es-tu pas le plus silencieux de tous?”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”
― Sun-Tzu, A Arte da Guerra

“You stopped speaking and only silence replied. But those words, those thousands, those millions of words that dried up in your throat, the inconsequential chit-chat, the cries of joy, the words of love, the silly laughter, just when will you find them again?
Now you live in dread of silence. But are you not the most silent of all?”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Cubitum eamus?"
"What?"
"Nothing.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Conscience, my dear, is a kind of stick that everyone picks up to thrash his neighbor with, but one he never uses against himself.”
― Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions

“From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”
― Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual

“It's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Dear Milena,
I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“...we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky, and everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.

I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, not she that She for me.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“With cities, it is as if with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“Of course, if I chose to be an optimist, there was always the possibility that, if our two parallels continued to infinity, the moment would come when they would touch.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“And at the bottom of each of those eyes I lived, or rather another me lived, one of the images of me, and it encountered the image of her, the most faithful image of her, in that beyond which opens, past the semiliquid sphere of the irises, in the darkness of the pupils, the mirrored hall of the retinas, in our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries.”
― Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.
You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Marianne, he said, I'm not a religious person but I do sometimes think God made you for me.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People