Blaž > Blaž's Quotes

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Andre Gide

“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The fortnight at Venice passed quickly and sweetly-- perhaps too sweetly; I was drowning in honey, stingless.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“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

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“...we often mistake love for fireworks - for drama and dysfunction. But real love is very quiet, very still. It's boring, if seen from the perspective of high drama. Love is deep and calm - and constant.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“Sorrow compressed my heart, and I felt I would die, and then . . . Well, then I woke up.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“A dream is a strange thing. Pictures appear with terrifying clarity, the minutest details engraved like pieces of jewelry, and yet we leap unawares through huge abysses of time and space. Dreams seem to be controlled by wish rather than reason, the heart rather than the head–and yet, what clever, tricky convolutions my reason sometimes makes while I’m asleep! Things quite beyond comprehension happen to reason in dreams!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

“Not knowing when the dawn will come
I open every door.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“Remember, love that doesn't include honesty doesn't deserve to be called love.”
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient

“One has to be wounded in order to become a healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade's book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans. Nobody becomes either one or the other without first having been wounded, either cut open by the initiator and having certain magical stones inserted into his body, or a spear thrown at his neck, or some such thing. Generally, the experiences are ecstatic – stars or ghost-like demons – hit them or cut them open, but always they have to be pierced or cut apart before they become healers, for that is how they acquire the capacity for healing others.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

“It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
― Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I married my love in the springtime,
but by summer he'd locked me away.
He'd murdered me dead by the autumn,
& by winter I was naught but decay.

It's cold where I am and so lonely,
but in loneliness I will remain.
Unloved, unavenged, & forgotten,
until I am whole once again.”
― Emily Carroll, Through the Woods

“There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology

“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Name one hero who was happy.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression