Luca Forte > Luca's Quotes

“All things left her, all
But one. Her highborn courtliness
Accompanied her to the end,
Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,
In a way like an angel's. Of Elvira
The first thing that I saw - such years ago -
Was her smile and also it was the last.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

“Il più bello dei mari
è quello che non navigammo.
Il più bello dei nostri figli
non è ancora cresciuto.
I più belli dei nostri giorni
non li abbiamo ancora vissuti.
E quello
che vorrei dirti di più bello
non te l'ho ancora detto.”
― Nâzım Hikmet Ran, Poesie d'amore

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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

“Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Don't tell people what you are thinking, or you will miss them terribly when you are away.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“My past is everything I failed to be.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense",”
― Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.

Everything passes.

That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.

Everything passes.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves—it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being