Marilena Turquoise > Marilena's Quotes

“But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë

“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Μας έλεγαν θα νικήσετε όταν υποταχτείτε.
Υποταχτήκαμε και βρήκαμε τη στάχτη.
Μας έλεγαν θα νικήσετε όταν αγαπήσετε.
Αγαπήσαμε και βρήκαμε τη στάχτη.
Μας έλεγαν θα νικήσετε όταν εγκαταλείψετε τη ζωή σας.
Εγκαταλείψαμε τη ζωή μας και βρήκαμε τη στάχτη...
Βρήκαμε τη στάχτη. Μένει να ξαναβρούμε τη ζωή μας, τώρα που δεν έχουμε πια τίποτα. Φαντάζομαι εκείνος που θα ξαναβρεί τη ζωή, έξω από τόσα χαρτιά, τόσα συναισθήματα, τόσες διαμάχες και τόσες διδασκαλίες, θα είναι κάποιος σαν εμάς, μόνο λιγάκι πιο σκληρός στη μνήμη.”
― Γιώργος Σεφέρης, Τετράδιο γυμνασμάτων: 1928-1937

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
― William Faulkner, Nobel Prize in Literature Acceptance Speech, 1949

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“You put too much stock in human intelligence, it doesn't annihilate human nature.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up.”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“If you have love, even plain cold water is sweet.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“I am very aware of the preciousness of time. Seize the moment. Act now.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“No matter how powerful a computer you have, if you put lousy data in you will get lousy predictions out.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“People want answers to the big questions, like why we are here. They don’t expect the answers to be easy, so they are prepared to struggle a bit. When people ask me if a God created the universe, I tell them that the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth—the Earth is a sphere that doesn’t have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.
Do I have faith? We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realisation: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust. But there’s a sense in which we live on, in our influence, and in our genes that we pass on to our children. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives, full of opportunity and love. We are all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“there are lots of things you want to do before your life is over.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“When you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realise that there are lots of things you want to do before your life is over.”
― Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions

“LA MENTE HUMANA es como la vida: un laberinto que a veces saca de quien se pierde en él cosas que jamás habría imaginado.”
― Alejandro Palomas, Un hijo

“History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“You shout because it makes you brave or you want to announce your recklessness.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth--all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.”
― Don DeLillio, Underworld

“I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.”
― Don DeLillo, Underworld

“I am not lucky. You know what I am? I am smart, I am talented, I take advantage of the opportunities that come my way and I work really, really hard. Don’t call me lucky. Call me a badass.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person