Sabrina > Sabrina's Quotes

“Be a mirror, she told herself again. Be a mirror when you meet a knife; be a mirror when you meet a stone.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“...The asses who might really think that in the starlight of eternity, my [and her] conjunction, somewhere in North America, in the nineteenth century represented but one trillionth of a trillionth part of a pinpoint planet's significance can bray... because the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality, shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse—laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air—between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception.

I am weak. I write badly.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“I felt that I did not really remember her except through the pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at their feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“He had (like a calculator who means to do nothing else until such time as he has resolved his problem) put down beside him the cigar that, a short while ago, he had had in his mouth, but which he no longer had the necessary freedom of mind to smoke. On remarking the two crouched divinities borne on its arms by the chair set facing, you might've thought the Baron was seeking to solve the riddle of the Sphinx...

Now, the figure to which M. de Charlus was applying, and with such intensity, all his mental powers, was that proposed to him by the lineaments of the young Marquis de Surgis' face. It seemed to be, so profound was M. de Charlus' absorption before it, some heraldic motto, some conundrum, some problem in algebra, the riddle or formula of which he was seeking to penetrate.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest if not our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“How," he pondered, "how was my thought any stupider than all the other thoughts and theories that have been swarming and colliding in the world, ever since the world began?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The boundlessness of space nurtured a dark new humanity in its dark embrace.”
― Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

“It had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus. ...Could things thrust their hands up and grip one; was there no safety?”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“World of sleep, where our inner knowledge, held in subjugation by the disturbances in our organs, quickens the rhythm of our heart or of our breathing, for the same dosage of alarm, of sadness, of remorse is a hundred times more potent when thus injected into our veins; as soon as, in order to travel along the arteries of the subterranean city, we have embarked on the dark waves of our own blood, as if on the sixfold meanders of some eternal Lethe, tall, solemn forms appear to us, accost us, and then go from us, leaving us in tears.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”
― Johann wolfgang von Goethe

“There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor, and nothing easier than flattery.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime And Punishment

“...that melancholy which we feel when we cease to obey orders which, from one day to another, keep the future hidden, and realise that we have at last begun to live in real earnest, as a grown-up person, the life, the only life that any of us has at his disposal.”
― Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

“So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“It is the wicked deception of love that it begins by making us dwell not upon a woman in the outside world but upon a doll inside our head, the only woman who is always available in fact, the only one we shall ever possess, whom the arbitrary nature of memory, almost as absolute as that of the imagination, may have made as different from the real woman as the real Balbec had been from the Balbec I imagined- a dummy creation that little by little, to our own detriment, we shall force the real woman to resemble.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“We belong to the Earth and the sea, you belong to the stars." "Is that bad?" "No. It's very good.”
― Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

“Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Idea For A Short Documentary Film

Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.”
― Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

“Making female noises, shrieking and squeaking and being shrill, all those things that annoy people with longer vocal cords. Another case where the length of organs seems to be so important to men.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“We demand a rebellious spirit of those who have no chance to learn that rebellion is possible, but we the privileged hold still and see no evil.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

“I don’t have a gun and I don’t have even one wife and my sentences tend to go on and on and on, with all this syntax in them. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than have syntax. Or semicolons. I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after “semicolons,” and another one after “now.”

And another thing. Ernest Hemingway would have died rather than get old. And he did. He shot himself. A short sentence. Anything rather than a long sentence, a life sentence. Death sentences are short and very, very manly. Life sentences aren’t. They go on and on, all full of syntax and qualifying clauses and confusing references and getting old. And that brings up the real proof of what a mess I have made of being a man: I am not even young. Just about the time they finally started inventing women, I started getting old. And I went right on doing it. Shamelessly. I have allowed myself to get old and haven’t done one single thing about it, with a gun or anything.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“It is not enough in love, as in everyday life, to fear only the future: one must fear the past, which often becomes real to us only after the future, and I am not simply speaking of the past about which we learn only after the event, but of the one we have carried within us for many years, and which we only now learn to read.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“Two traits of Albertine’s character came back to me at that moment, one to comfort and the other to appall me, for we can find everything in our memory: it is a kind of pharmacy or chemical laboratory, where one’s hand may fall at any moment on a sedative drug or a dangerous poison.”
― Marcel Proust, The Prisoner: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5

“While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.”
― Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”
― Marcel Proust

“Everything great in the world is done by neurotics; they alone founded our religions and created our masterpieces.”
― Marcel Proust