Paulina > Paulina's Quotes

“A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear to touch you.
The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear.

No date. No name attached.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

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

“I can resist anything except temptation.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.”
― Pablo Neruda

“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time.”
― Murakami, Haruki

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Love: Ten Poems

“homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“If you should ask me where I've been all this time
I have to say "Things happen."
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration:
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead?”
― Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“Actually last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little angora crop top told me he was gay a sex addict a narcotic addict a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo.”
― Helen Fielding

“There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Writing is a constant exercise in longing.”
― Isabelle Allende

“The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.”
― Isabel Allende

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest