aj > aj's Quotes

“To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“This is my problem. I want other people to tell me how they feel. But I'm not so sure I want to return the favor.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Ari?” My father’s voice was soft. “Ari, Ari, Ari. You’re fighting this war in the worst possible way.”

“I don’t know how to fight it, Dad.”

“You should ask for help,” he said.

“I don’t know how to do that, either.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence - but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“I sit, with all my theories, metaphors, and equations, Shakespeare and Milton, Barthes, Du Fu, and Homer, masters of death who can’t, at last, teach me how to touch my dead.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“I will follow you to the ends of the world.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Miriam wished for so much in those final moments. Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last. No. It was not so bad, Miriam thought, that she should die this way. Not so bad. This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate belongings.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Mariam lay on the couch, hands tucked between her knees, watched the whirlpool of snow twisting and spinning outside the window. She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how people like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability--or your mother's--to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for the small possibility of a fatal brain hemorrhage? Your right hand's function to stop seizures? How much neurological suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient, and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Like a premature lung I felt unready for the responsibility of sustaining life.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,”
― William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

“When they ask you where you’re from, tell them your name was fleshed from the toothless mouth of a war-woman. That you were not born but crawled, headfirst— into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them the body is a blade that sharpens by cutting.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“...teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves...”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbor's, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.”
― Francois Voltaire

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
― Susan Sontag

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite a word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being