Yukti > Yukti's Quotes

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
― George Gordon Byron

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.”
― Ingmar Bergman

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence

“If there's one thing I've learned, it's this: We all want everything to be okay. We don't even wish so much for fantastic or marvelous or outstanding. We will happily settle for okay, because most of the time, okay is enough.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“It was a mistake," you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
― Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours: A Legacy of Verse

“Life is too long to say anything definitely; always say perhaps.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“There is no greatness where simplicity, goodness and truth are absent”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.”
― Frida Kahlo

“If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”
― Abraham Sutzkever

“I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely essential.”
― Jessamyn West

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
― Robert Graves

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

“Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.”
― e.e. cummings

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
― Søren Kierkegaard , The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard