Wei Chang > Wei's Quotes

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“someone will remember us
I say
even in another time”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
― Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches

“...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

“So much working, reading, thinking, living to do! A lifetime is not long enough.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“may you sleep on the breast of your delicate friend”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
― Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
― Susan Sontag

“On July 2, McCandless finished reading Tolstoy's "Family Happiness", having marked several passages that moved him:
"He was right in saying that the only certain happiness in life is to live for others...

I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books , music, love for one's neighbor - such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps - what more can the heart of a man desire?" ...”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“He read a lot. He used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”
― Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor

“The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.”
― Susan Sontag

“Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.”
― Susan Sontag

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Love is friendship on fire -- anonymous”
― Susan Sontag

“Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“Do not fall in love with people like me.
I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth.
I will destroy you in the most beautiful way possible. And when I leave you will finally understand, why storms are named after people.”
― Caitlyn Siehl, Literary Sexts: A Collection of Short & Sexy Love Poems

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“you burn me”
― Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace