Cif > Cif's Quotes

“He—that's Simon Bolivar—was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. Damn it," he sighed. "'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'

"So what's the labyrinth?" I asked her.

"That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.”
― William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“If I could have him like this in my dreams every night of my life, I'd stake my entire life on dreams and be done with the rest.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Is it better to speak or die?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Life... is a paradise to what we fear of death.”
― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“Maybe it’s sad that these are now memories. And maybe it’s not sad.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and--and in love before they're born.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely”
― Sylvia Plath

“Enjoy it. Because it's happening.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
― Franz Kafka

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

“All suffering originates from craving, from attachment, from desire.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Are you becoming what you've always hated?”
― Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

“I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1935-1951

“so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”
― Milan Kundera

“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger