Antonia Ivanova > Antonia's Quotes

“But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating.

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Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

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...perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. Perhaps! ”
― Joseph Conrad

“happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness”
― Graham Greene

“What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.”
― Graham Greene

“...solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen.
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Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again.”
― Virginia Woolf

“- Виждате ли този човек е една многостранна личност - скитник джентълмен поет мечтател самотник винаги с надежда за любов и приключения. Той би искал да ви убеди че е учен музикант херцог играч на поло. Но в същото време не би се посвенил да събира угарки или да открадне захарното петле на някое бебе. И естествено ако това се изисква от обстоятелствата би ритнал и една уважаема дама по задника - но само когато е крайно разгневен!

(Чарли Чаплин Моята автобиография)”
― Charlie Chaplin

“В ония дни Хавай беше красив остров. И все пак мисълта да живея там на две хиляди мили от континента ме потискаше въпреки слънчевата му красота ананасите захарната тръстика екзотичните плодове и цветя с удоволствие бих се върнал защото чувствах известна клаустрофобия - като че ме бяха затворили в лилия.”
― Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”
― E.B. White

“Приспособяваме се тихо към живота,
доволни и от бледите утехи,
които вятърът довява
и пуска в празните ни джобове.
Но още храним обич към света
щом спираме пред гладно котенце на прага,
готови да го приютим в протрития ръкав,
да го спасим от улицата - шумна и жестока.
(...)
Играта е такава - кара ни да се усмихваме насила.
И все пак виждаме луната, спряла над самотна уличка,
да преобръща празна кофа в искряща чаша на смеха,
и все пак чуваме през веселия шум и нашите стремежи
гласа на котенце, което вика сред пустинята.”
― Hart Crane

“Само интелект и никакви чувства - това е характерно за съвършения престъпник; само чувства и никакъв интелект - това е образецът на безвредния луд. Но когато интелектът и чувствата са идеално уравновесени, се получава отличният актьор.”
― Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography

“Когато обясняваш даден образ на истински актьор или актриса, често са достатъчни само една дума или фраза: "Това е фалстафовски тип" или "Това е една модерна мадам Бовари". Разправят, че Джед Харис веднъж казал на една актриса: "Този образ притежава подвижността на черно лале, което се поклаща от вятъра." Това е вече прекалено.”
― Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography

“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked New Zealander, whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided twentieth of a shed to sleep under! But compare the health of the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to his grave.

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents; and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, by a Christianity entrenched in establishments and forms, some vigor of wild virtue. For every Stoic was a Stoic; but in Christendom where is the Christian?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls -- with the great outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by colour can come into contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men, in many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind and narrow as race prejudice. I often say to our students, in the course of my talks to them on Sunday evenings in the chapel, that the longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for -- and dying for, if need be -- is the opportunity of making some one else more happy and more useful.”
― Booker Washington; T. 8vo

“He had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“and so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Улицата е моята консерватория.”
― Edith Piaf, Edith Piaf: 25 chansons

“Sandwich outdoors isn’t a sandwich anymore. Tastes different than indoors, notice? Got more spice. Tastes like mint and pinesap. Does wonders for the appetite.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“- Невъзможно е, Момон, в една къща да няма мъж. Това е по-лошо от ден без слънце. Без слънце можеш да минеш, нали има електричество, но в един дом, в който липсва някоя мъжка дрипа, където не се виждат чифт чорапи или вратовръзка, където на някой стол не виси изоставено сако, е дом на вдовица, в такъв дом можеш да откачиш.”
― Edith Piaf, Edith Piaf: 25 chansons

“Моето слънце пламва у мен, когато падне нощта. Само в този момент започвам да виждам ясно.”
― Edith Piaf, Edith Piaf: 25 chansons

“По едно време, в началото, аз те ревнувах и от съня ти. Питах се: къде ли отива, когато спи? Какво вижда? А ти се усмихваше, протягаше се, затова аз започнах да мразя хората, които сънуваш. Често те будех, за да ги пропъдиш. Но ти обичаше да сънуваш и се разяряваше, че те събуждам. Не можех да понасям невъзмутимата ти физиономия.”
― Jean Cocteau

“For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.”
― Virginia Woolf , Orlando

“Life and a lover”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“Every single thing [...] he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of grass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“He sighed profoundly, and flung himself - there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word - on the earth at the foot of the oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship - it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out. To the oak tree he tied it and as he lay there, gradually the flutter in and about him stilled itself; the little leaves hung, the deer stopped; the pale summer clouds stayed; his limbs grew heavy on the ground; and he lay so still that by degrees the deer stopped nearer and the rooks wheeled round him and the swallows dipped and circled and the dragonflies shot past, as if all the fertility and amorous activity of a summer's evening were woven web-like about his body.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando

“It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Трябва да живееш винаги влюбен в нещо,
което не можеш да стигнеш.
Човек расте на височина от това,
че се мъчи да стигне високото.”
― Maxim Gorky

“Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an apalling and hopeless ennui. She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, - a pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life's delirium. Edna vaguely wondered what she meant by "life's delirium." It had crossed her thought like some unsought, extraneous impression.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“Even as a child she had lived her own small life within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters, - men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their candles; and their descendant to this day always acts as if the house were his camp, - wears his hat at all hours, tumbles himself about, and puts his heels on the tops of chairs or mantel-pieces, just as his father rolled on the green sward, and put his upon trees or logs, - keep all the windows and doors open, winter and summer, that he may get air enough for his great lungs, - calls everybody "stranger", with nonchalant bonhommie, and is altogether the frankest, easiest, most jovial creature living.”
― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin