Zohre Harazmehr > Zohre's Quotes

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and our yearning for the life denied us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Beauty is a promise of happiness.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
― Virginia Woolf

“They've got no idea what happiness is, they don't know that without this love there is no happiness or unhappiness for us--there is no life.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If you love me as you say you do,' she whispered, 'make it so that I am at peace.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Something magical has happened to me: like a dream when one feels frightened and creepy, and suddenly wakes up to the knowledge that no such terrors exist. I have wakened up.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“I'm like a starving man who has been given food. Maybe he's cold, and his clothes are torn, and he's ashamed, but he's not unhappy.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“what she loved: life, London, this moment of June.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. If you put her in a room with someone, up went her back like a cat's; or she purred.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is...at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away...”
― Virginia Woolf

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
― Virginia Woolf

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Do not allow me to forget you”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you're everything that exists; the reality of everything.”
― Virginia Woolf, Night and Day

“Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude”
― Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude

“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own