Kika > Kika's Quotes

“When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.”
― Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life

“Perhaps ...
To R.A.L.

Perhaps some day the sun will shine again,
And I shall see that still the skies are blue,
And feel one more I do not live in vain,
Although bereft of you.

Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet,
Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay,
And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet,
Though You have passed away.

Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright,
And crimson roses once again be fair,
And autumn harvest fields a rich delight,
Although You are not there.

But though kind Time may many joys renew,
There is one greatest joy I shall not know
Again, because my heart for loss of You
Was broken, long ago.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“How fortunate we were who still had hope I did not then realise; I could not know how soon the time would come when we should have no more hope, and yet be unable to die”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Like no one else... you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places... The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon... or books that have meant more to me than I can explain... This is grand, but still it isn't enough for this world... The earthly and obvious part of me longs to see and touch you and realise you as tangible.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“It is quite impossible to understand,’ I commented afterwards, ‘how we can be such strong individualists, so insistent on the rights and claims of every human soul, and yet at the same time countenance (and if we are English, even take quite calmly) this wholesale murder, which if it were applied to animals or birds or indeed anything except men would fill us with a sickness and repulsion greater than we could endure.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Why, I wondered, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, who ought therefore to know better, generalize so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth--that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent and every setback insuperable?”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“I know that these things will never come back. I may see the rocks again, and smell the flowers, and watch the dawn sunshine chase the shadows from the old sulphuric-colored walls, but the light that sprang from the heightened consciousness of wartime, the glory seen by the enraptured ingenious eyes of twenty-two, will be upon them no more. I am a girl no longer, and the world, for all its excitements of chosen work and individualistic play, has grown tame in comparison with Malta during those years of our anguish.

It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist’s real problem — a problem still incompletely imagined, and still quite unresolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour is dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever, which as soon as war is over dies out and shows itself for the will-o’-the-wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Perhaps now I shall one day rise, and be worthy of him who in his life both in peace and in war and in his death on the fields of France has shown me “the way more plain”. At any rate, if ever I do face danger and suffering with some measure of his heroism, it will be because I have learnt through him that love is supreme, that love is stronger than death and the fear of death.’ 8 Fortunately for the mental balance of average mankind, exalted emotions of this type do not as a rule last very long, but before mine relapsed once more into despondency, respite came from an undignified but not altogether unwelcome source.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks.”
― William Blake

“It is so many years before one can believe enough in what one feels even to know what the feeling is”
― W.B. Yeats

“We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon”
― W.B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age

“Time drops in decay
Like a candle burnt out.
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
But, kindly old rout
Of the fire-born moods,
You pass not away.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I am no longer alone with myself, and I can only artificially recall the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude. This is the shadow side of the fortune of love.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“The kernel of all jealousy is lack of love.”
― Carl Jung

“One loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss perhaps.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

“There is another world, but it is in this one.”
― William Butler Yeats

“...I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made...”
― William Butler Yeats

“I am ashes where once I was fire...”
― Lord Byron, Selected Poems

“Here we are and there we go:---but where?”
― Lord Byron, Lord Byron Selected Poems - Folio Society Edition