Elena > Elena's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, The Bell at Sealey Head

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“I'm happy. Which often looks like crazy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.”
― Anne Tyler

“To learn something, to master something, anything, is as sweet as first love.”
― Geoffrey Wolff

“Ja sam sakupljač neobičnih stvari.
Neka drugi sakupljaju značke i marke.
Ja sakupljam dane, časove i trenutke.”
― Miroslav Antić

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Ona nema nikoga osim sunca i mene.”
― Branko Miljković

“I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing: it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is, the less mysterious it proves to be.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that is wants to live humbly for one.”
― Wilhelm Stekel

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“We live for books.”
― Umberto Eco

“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
― Haruki Marukami

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“A man without a woman is like a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman who makes the man go off.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible.”
― Betrand Russell

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
― Mark Twain

“I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.”
― Charles Bukowski

“there is a loneliness in this world so great
that you can see it in the slow movement of
the hands of a clock.

people so tired
mutilated
either by love or no love.

people just are not good to each other
one on one.

the rich are not good to the rich
the poor are not good to the poor.

we are afraid.

our educational system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.

it hasn't told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.

or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone

untouched
unspoken to

watering a plant.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell