Cecilia Llompart > Cecilia's Quotes

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”
― W.S. Merwin

“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

“What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.”
― Walt Whitman

“It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt --
O, marvelous error --
That there was a beehive here inside my heart
And the golden bees were making white combs
And sweet honey from all my failures.”
― Antonio Machado

“I do not judge the universe.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
― Rumi

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“All great and precious things are lonely.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“If people reach perfection they vanish, you know.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Americus, Book I

“All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims– and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“...grief.
If you eat too much of it, you want more, you can never get enough.”
― Ai

“Enchantment, even for a day, can make a whole life bearable.”
― Larry Colker, Amnesia and Wings

“With every increase in the degree of consciousness, and in proportion to that increase, the intensity of despair increases: the more consciousness the more intense the despair”
― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.”
― Aimé Césaire

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Case of Identity - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that 'for nothing,' in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
― Salvador Dali

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“At night I would climb the steps to the Sacre-Coeur, and I would watch Paris, that futile oasis, scintillating in the wilderness of space. I would weep, because it was so beautiful, and because it was so useless.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

“Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.”
― W.S. Merwin

“Verde que te quiero verde”
― Federico García Lorca