velyuriya > velyuriya's Quotes

“Who does not remember, that at such a time as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees in innumerable far-off places the woe which is close at hand?”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Assignation

“Ceea ce simt pentru tine nu e nici dragoste, nici ură... e ceea ce simte somnambulul pentru lună... Încolo nimic...”
― Camil Petrescu, Patul lui Procust

“O îmbrăţişare adevărată a corpurilor e frumoasă ca o convorbire între două inteligenţe, în care nici un moment una nu pierde înţelegerea cu cealaltă, sau ca o carte citită cu pasiune, în care fiecare amănunt e priceput şi justificat.”
― Camil Petrescu, Patul lui Procust

“La fel te câștigă prin pătrunderea lui nu autorul care prezintă în carte cazuri și caractere groase, cam unanim cunoscute, ci anumite nuanțe considerate aproape secrete, care sunt însă cu atât mai revelatoare, căci garantează ele singure și pentru adevărurile generale de suprafață. Uimirea cea mare, înspăimântătoare uneori, e să descoperi cât de total seamănă între ei oamenii prin ce au mai subtil și mai secret, când se cred așa de diferiți ca aspect.”
― Camil Petrescu, Patul lui Procust

“Fiecare suntem ursiţi de la facerea lumii să fim aşa cum suntem, aşa cum e ursit sâmburele să dea bostan, şi bobul de grâu spic…
S-a făcut în mine ca o lumină de moarte şi înţeleg acum, neaşteptat, toate întâmplările şi toate faptele omeneşti ale acestui an de delir, de când te cunosc…”
― Camil Petrescu, Patul lui Procust

“To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Je me demande, dit-il, si les étoiles sont éclairées afin que chacun puisse un jour retrouver la sienne.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince

“Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his, his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy, if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“It's a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Man made God in his own image, so it's natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man's made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It's his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Movie characters might chase each other through the fog or race down the stairs of burning buildings, but that’s for beginners. Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings. I wanted to say something to this effect, but my hand puppets were back home in their drawer. Instead, I pulled my chair a few inches closer, and we sat silently at our little table on the square, looking for all the world like two people in love.”
― David Sedaris, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

“The abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see some one near us tottering that we realise all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Machine Stops

“Once more the west was retreating, once again the orderly stars were dotting the eastern sky. There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound on her lover’s arm, she felt that she was having her share.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“He gazes into her eyes and lies with such tenderness, such heartfelt feeling, such implicit sadness at her want of faith in him, that she can't question him. To question him would turn her cynical and hard. She would rather be kissed; she would rather be cherished. She would rather believe.”
― Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips

“From that day on it was as if Ren freed me from gravity. I was floating in the sky. Higher. Higher. Higher.”
― Ai Yazawa, Nana, Vol. 1

“It wasn't so simple as "love" or "desire." More like jealousy, envy, a sense of uneasiness and need.”
― Ai Yazawa, Nana, Vol. 1

“Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the west. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. what need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“don’t say you’se ole. You’se uh lil girl baby all de time. God made it so you spent yo’ ole age first wid somebody else, and saved up yo’ young girl days to spend wid me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Then you must tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God