Shivi Bhalla > Shivi's Quotes

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Oscar Wilde

“So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“The constant happiness is curiosity.”
― Alice Munro

“There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can't know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you've reached it. I believe this.”
― Alice Munro

“Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“You cannot let your parents anywhere near your real humiliations.”
― Alice Munro, Open Secrets

“She was learning, quite late, what many people around her appeared to have known since childhood – that life can be perfectly satisfying without major achievements.”
― Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness: Stories

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

“wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
—The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems

“Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.”
― Louise Gluck, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Half my concern in love became how to disguise love, to make it harmless and merry.”
― Alice Munro

“Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.”
― Wislawa Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems

“Love that stammers, that stutters, is apt to be the love that loves best.”
― Gabriela Mistral

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
― Albert Camus

“I wish that death had spared me until your library had been complete.”
― Lorenzo de' Medici

“We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“you will die with a clenched fist and a tense jaw, the epitome of hatred and struggle, because you are not a symbol but a genuine member of the society to be destroyed. You are useful as I am, but you are not aware of how useful your contribution is to the society that sacrifices you”
― Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey