Jam > Jam's Quotes

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Such wounds to the heart will probably never heal. But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”
― Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

“I’ve not learned the acceptable way of saying you fascinate me...I’ve not even learned how to say I like you without frightening people away-”
― Nikki Giovanni

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.”
― Harun Yahya

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”
― Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Elective Affinities

“Artists and artisans both demonstrate with perfect clarity that a person is least able to appropriate for himself those things which are most peculiarly his. His works leave him as birds do the best in which they were hatched.

In this respect an architect's fate is the strangest of all. How often he employs his whole intellect and warmth of feeling in the creation of rooms from which he must exclude himself. Royal halls owe their splendor to him, and he may not share in the enjoyment of their finest effects. In temples he draws the line between himself and the holy of holies; the steps he built to ceremonies that lift up the heady, he may no longer climb; just as the goldsmith worships only from afar the monstrance which he wrought in the fire and set with jewels. With the keys of the palace the architect hands over all it's comforts to the wealthy man, and has not the least part in them. Surely in this way art must little by little grow away from the artist, if the work, like a child provided for, no longer teaches back to touch its father.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities

“When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu
so she replied: show me someone
not full of herself
and i’ll show you a hungry person”
― Nikki Giovanni

“I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.”
― James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”
― Audre Lorde

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Remember: the time you feel lonely is the time you most need to be by yourself. Life's cruelest irony.”
― Douglas Coupland, Shampoo Planet

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”
― Richard Siken

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Do not be absent for too long, then come and ask about how I am, details die with time and stories change.”
― Mahmoud Darwish

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson