Hri > Hri's Quotes

“Farsi Couplet:
Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast,
Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.


English Translation:
If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this”
― Amir Khusrau, The Writings of Amir Khusrau: 700 Years After the Prophet: A 13th-14th Century Legend of Indian-Sub-Continent

“Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.”
― Henry De Montherlant

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“a good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“I've tried in this telling, time and time again, to pinpoint the moment where everything starts to fall apart. Everything, meaning me. But there's also the opposite, where some little nut cracks open inside you and a tree starts to grow. Even harder to nail. Because that thing's going to be growing a long time before you notice. Years maybe. then one day you say, Huh, that little crack between my ears has turned into this whole damn tree of wonderful. 515”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.” I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“You get used to it, not in the good way, to the extent of the entire world oftentimes feeling like a place where you weren’t invited. If you’ve been here, you know. If not, must be nice.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

(Popular misquote of "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.")”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Since life is our most precious gift
And since it is given to us to live but once,
Let us so live that we will not regret”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“The human heart...tells us that we are more alike than we are unalike.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“When I find myself filling with rage over the loss of a beloved, I try as soon as possible to remember that my concerns and questions should be focused on what I learned or what I have yet to learn from my departed love. What legacy was left which can help me in the art of living a good life?

Did I learn to be kinder,
To be more patient,
And more generous,
More loving,
More ready to laugh,
And more easy to accept honest tears?
If I accept those legacies of my departed beloveds, I am able to say, Thank You to them for their love and Thank You to God for their lives.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“I think I love him for this loneliness, that it's what pushed me toward him. I love his aloofness, his disengagement with the outside world. Such singularity moves me.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.

Even now I remain fascinated by this sentence. Understand, it isn't the premonition that fascinates me, nor even the fact that it has been realized. It's also not the maturity or poignancy implied. It's not the arrangement of the words, even if I'm aware that I probably wouldn't have been able to come up with those exact ones myself. It's the violence that the words carry within them, their admission of inferiority and, at the same time, of love.

He tells me something I did not know: that I will leave.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“It was love, of course. And tomorrow, there will be a great emptiness. But we could not continue—you have your life waiting for you, and I will never change. I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“It's the most simple words that destroy us.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.”
― Philippe Besson, Lie With Me

“I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma