Roberta > Roberta's Quotes

“There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

- Gloria”
― Patti Smith, Patti Smith Collected Lyrics, 1970-2015: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future

“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.”
― Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Hearts are made to be broken.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”
― oscar wilde

“Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
― Roland Barthes

“My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made its mind up
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do.
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.”
― Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns

“Write to amuse? What an appalling suggestion!
I write to make people anxious and miserable and to
worsen their indigestion.”
― Wendy Cope, Serious Concerns

“Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anaïs Nin, Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932-1934

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don't know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness. In reality those who satisfy me are those who simply allow me to live with my ''idea of them.”
― Anais Nin

“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
― Anais Nin

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934