Carme > Carme's Quotes

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.”
― Nadine Gordimer

“Sometimes, you think you have forgotten everything, that the rust and dust of the years have destroyed all the things we once entrusted to their voracious appetite. But all it takes is a noise, a smell, a sudden, unexpected touch, and suddenly the alluvion of time sweeps pitilessly over us, and our memories light up with all the brilliance and fury of a lightning flash”
― Julio Llamazares, The Yellow Rain

“Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my
revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of
consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation
to death—and I refuse suicide.”
― Albert Camus

“The people must be the ones to win, not the war, because war has nothing to do with humanity. War is something inhuman.”
― Zlata Filipović

“Ella sonrió por primera vez y, de repente, su cara dejó de ser vulgar.

-Sí, Giorgio y yo pasamos muchos ratos ahí. ¿Usted lee?

-Cuando tengo tiempo contestó Brunetti. Hoy en día ya no se puede preguntar a una persona a quién vota ni, en un país católico, cúal es su religión. Las preguntas sobre las preferencias sexuales son indiscretas y de cocina suele hablarse preferentemente durante las comidas, por lo que, quizá, la única pregunta reveladora de tu personalidad que aún se te puede formular es si lees o no y, en caso afirmativo, cuáles son tus gustos.”
― Donna Leon

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”
― Daniel Defoe

“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
― OMAR KHAYYAM, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.”
― John W. Campbell Jr.

“We are not all born at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.”
― Mary Austin

“We are who we are, be­cause of those we choose to love and be­cause of those who love us.”
― Kate Mosse, The Winter Ghosts

“There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“Stories may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and which can sometimes pay the rent.”
― Neil Gaiman

“There is only one way to overcome the difficulty of writing, and that is to write. Thought only becomes effective and productive at the time of writing.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Life Form

“We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.”
― Andrea Barrett

“I'm a candle flame that sways in currents of air you can't see. You need to be the one who steadies me to burn.”
― Nadine Gordimer, The House Gun

“They were all brilliant. They wrote books and painted pictures, and if they ever stopped talking, which I was sure they would never do, they planned to change the world.”
― Gloria Whelan, Listening for Lions

“Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.”
― Dang Thuy Tram

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.”
― Michel Onfray

“Most of us can't help but live as though we've got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.”
― André Aciman

“Friendship is a simple thing, and yet complicated; friendship is on the surface, something natural, something taken for granted, and yet underneath one could find worlds.”
― Jamaica Kincaid

“Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.”
― Nicholson Baker

“Love is like a tree: it grows by itself, roots itself deeply in our being and continues to flourish over a heart in ruin. The inexplicable fact is that the blinder it is, the more tenacious it is. It is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame