Cristina > Cristina's Quotes

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I don't go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.”
― Antonio Tabucchi

“Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.”
― José Saramago

“Contra la fisiología. Contra esta humana dependencia de ser abrazado, tocado, lamido con minúscula delicadeza por una lengua exacta. Me gustaría escribir contra la fisiología, porque la fisiología es imposible. No quiero salir a la vida, no quiero bajar a las tiendas a comprar latas ni arroz, tu eres mi concha, Brezo, quiero quedarme en ti”
― Belén Gopegui, The Scale of Maps

“cayó en la melancolía, luego en la inapetencia, de allí en el insomnio, de éste en el abatimiento, más tarde en el delirio y, por esta fatal pendiente, en la locura, que ahora le hace desvariar y que todos lamentamos.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“pero perseverar en obstinado desconsuelo es una conducta de impía terquedad; es un pesar indigno del hombre; muestra una voluntad rebelde al Cielo, un corazón débil, un alma sin resignación, una inteligencia limitada e inculta.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Viver é como escrever sem corrigir.”
― António Lobo Antunes

“What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”
― Roberto Bolano

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain”
― Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth

“Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.

The day you die.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
― Doris Lessing

“Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.”
― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
― Doris Lessing

“A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough... People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.”
― Doris Lessing

“I do not want your admiration now, because I do not want your insults in the future. I bear with my loneliness now, in order to avoid greater loneliness in the years ahead. You see, loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in this modern age, so full of freedom, independence, and our own egotistical selves.”
― Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro

“I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things.”
― Natsume Soseki, Kokoro

“Perdón es el aroma que la violeta deja en el zapato que la aplastó.”
― Mark Twain

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
― Amelia Earhart

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

“La verdad es lo que te hará libre. Pero no hasta que haya acabado contigo.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest