Katya Petro > Katya's Quotes

“I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening hunger
I’d write to the point of suffocation
I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns
Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing
And I’d write about you
a lot more
than I should”
― Benedict Smith

“I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, and because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“...the stink of the cities is encroaching upon our holy places.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“In order for there to be a mirror of the world, it is necessary that the world have a form.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Will you tell me, William, you who know so much about heretics that you seem one of them, where the truth lies?"

"Nowhere, at times," William said, sadly.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened.

"Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“The glutton has become pure again," William said to me.

"But is this purity?" I asked, horrified.

"There must be some other kind as well," William said, "but, however it is, it always frightens me."

"What terrifies you most in purity?" I asked.

"Haste," William answered.”
― Umberto Eco

“Но все-таки хорошо, когда много цветов и друзей.”
― Agatha Christie, The Thirteen Problems

“I’ve had too much experience in life to believe in the infallibility of doctors. Some of them are clever men, some of them are not. And half the time the best of them don’t know what is the matter with you. I have no truck with doctors and their medicines myself.”
― Agatha Christie, The Thirteen Problems

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“This morning, at the library, when the Autodidact came to say good-morning to me, it took me ten seconds to recognise him. I saw an unknown face which was barely a face.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody that will inspire me with passion. You know, it’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness…there is even a moment, right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it, you don’t do it. I know that I shall never jump again.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
― Louise Gluck