Zozetta > Zozetta's Quotes

“These are the times that try men's souls.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Leisel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist's suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers...She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on...”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

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

“I don't think a tough question is disrespectful.”
― Helen Thomas

“Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies...”
― Eileen Chang

“Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.”
― Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner

“There was no harm in taking aim, even if the target was a dream.”
― John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Έχω κι εγώ ένα σωρό απωθημένους ουρανούς
μα δε σκοτώνω άστρα.”
― Κική Δημουλά

“So it is the old meat after all, no matter how old. Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. --Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”
― William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

“When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'.”
― Groucho Marx

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.”
― Victor Hugo

“[F]or me, being a Jew means feeling the tragedy of yesterday as an inner oppression. On my left forearm I bear the Auschwitz number; it reads more briefly than the Pentateuch or the Talmud and yet provides more thorough information. It is also more binding than basic formulas of Jewish existence. If to myself and the world, including the religious and nationally minded Jews, who do not regard me as one of their own, I say: I am a Jew, then I mean by that those realities and possibilities that are summed up in the Auschwitz number.”
― Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”
― Stephen King, Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

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

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.”
― Adam Lindsay Gordon

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“...learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer , Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“Αποφεύγουμε να λέμε στα παιδιά τι έγινε πριν γεννηθούν. Αρχικά είναι πολύ μικρά για να καταλάβουν, ύστερα είναι πολύ μεγάλα για ν' ακούσουν, μετά δεν έχουν καιρό για τέτοια, ώσπου στο τέλος είναι πια πολύ αργά. Αυτά έχουν οι οικογένειες. Ζεις με ανθρώπους που νομίζεις ότι τους γνωρίζεις, όμως είστε τελείως άγνωστοι. Ζητάμε θαύματα από τους δεσμούς αίματος: μια αρμονική συνύπαρξη που είναι εντελώς ανέφικτη. Απόλυτη εμπιστοσύνη. Σχέσεις που μένουν αναλλοίωτες στον χρόνο. Παραμυθιαζόμαστε με το ψέμα της συγγένειας.”
― Jean-Michel Guenassia, Le Club des incorrigibles optimistes

“Sometimes you look up and there just seems to be so many more stars that ever before. More. They burn brighter and they shine longer and they never vanish into your periphery when you turn your head. It's as if they come out for us and to remind us that their light took so long to come to us, that if we never had the patience to wait, we never would have seen them here, tonight, like this.

That as much as it hurts, sometimes it's all you can do, wait, endure and keep shining, knowing that eventually, your light will reach where it is supposed to reach and shine for who it is supposed to shine for.

It is never easy, but it is always worth it.”
― Tyler Knott Gregson, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series

“There is no more disastrous mania, no more dangerous whim, than the speculation over roads not taken.”
― Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The Sound of Things Falling

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”
― W H Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue

“The friends who met here and embraced are gone,
Each to his own mistake;”
― W.H. Auden