Nela > Nela's Quotes

“Describing our romantic longings in 'Life preserves,' therapist Harriet Lerner shares that most people want a partner 'who is mature and intelligent, loyal and trustworthy, loving and attentive, sensitive and open, kind and nurturant, competent and responsible.' No matter the intensity of this desire, she concludes: 'Few of us evaluate a prospective partner with the same objectivity and clarity that we might use to select a household appliance or a car.' To be capable of critically evaluating a partner we would need to be able to stand back and look critically at ourselves, at our needs, desires, and longings..... We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking then no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“A man could spend his whole life wandering about here and never find himself, especially if he is born lost.”
― José Saramago

“It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling.
It is a brown tree, that stands alone.
It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses.
How melancholy the evening is.
A while later,
The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn.
Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight
And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.
On the way home
The shepherd found the sweet body
Decayed in a bush of thorns.
I am a shadow far from darkening villages.
I drank the silence of God
Out of the stream in the trees.
Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.
At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.”
― Georg Trakl

“The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”
― Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.”
― José Saramago, Caim

“There are such moments in life: one unexpectedly discovers that perfection exists, that it, too, is a tiny sphere traveling in time, empty, transparent, luminous, and which sometimes (rarely) comes in our direction and encircles us for a few brief moments before traveling on to other parts and other people.”
― José Saramago, Manual of Painting and Calligraphy

“-Asti boga, barba Smoje....
-Šta se dogodilo?
-A vi čitate ćirilicu!
-E pa otkad! Jema već šezdeset godin.
-A zašto?
-Zato šta je znan. Da znan kineška oli arapska slova, čita bi i kineski i arapski.
-Ali ta su slova laživa.
-Jednako ka naša. Ne lažu, Luka slova, nego judi, judi lažu.”
― Miljenko Smoje, Skitan i pitan

“My father had a similar saying. He said that in heaven there's a huge cake reserved solely for married people who've never once regretted getting married. The cake's never been touched.”
― Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak

“I think of the memory as being rather like a dam," he said, after a pause for thought. "It irrigates and gives life to our whole spirit. But, like a dam, it needs overflow channels if it's not to burst its banks. Because if it ever does overflow or burst, its waters will destroy everything in its path.”
― Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak

“Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
― Henry Miller

“Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

“Only the poor are handicapped by honor.”
― Naguib Mahfouz, القاهرة الجديدة

“فقال له قلبه : لا تجزع فقد ينفتح الباب ذات يوم تحية لمن يخوضون الحياة ببراءة الاطفال وطموح الملائكة.”
― نجيب محفوظ, الحرافيش

“Sometimes the principal emotion of the person arrested is relief and even happiness! This is another aspect of human nature. It happened before the Revolution too: the Yekaterinodar schoolteacher Serdyukova, involved in the case of Aleksandr Ulyanov, felt only relief when she was arrested. But this feeling was a thousand times stronger during epidemics of arrests when all around you they were hauling in people like yourself and still had not come for you; for some reason they were taking their time. After all, that kind of exhaustion, that kind of suffering, is worse than any kind of arrest, and not only for a person of limited courage.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“أسوأ فشل عانيته هو فشلى مع الناس: ولقد كان ذلك نتاج انفصال روحى أخذ يزداد بالتدريج، انفصال نهائى عن التملك بينما أطلق لى العنان كى أتعاطف مع الناس. وغدوت شيئا فشيئا وعلى نحو لا يمكن تفسيره أشد عجزا عن ممارسة الحب.”
― لورنس داريل, Justine

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”
― Mark Twain

“Are we or are we not on an invisible spinning top, whipped by a thread of sunlight, on a grain of crazed sand which turns and turns without ever knowing why, without ever reaching a destination, as if it enjoyed turning like that, to make us feel a little colder or warmer, and make us die (often feeling that we have merely carried out a series of meaningless gestures) after fifty or sixty years?”
― Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don't need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control over your personal existence and the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don't take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“-Одакле си ти?
-Из Куча, Господаре
-А чи си ти из Куча?
-Миљана Јанкова, Поповића с Медуна
-Нијесам чуо за њега
-Ако нијеси чуо за њега, а ти чуј за мене: ја сам Марко Миљанов и бољега Куча од мене нема!”
― Marko Miljanov, Primjeri čojstva i junaštva

“Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed - while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.”
― Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Kad smo bili mladi, učili su nas o bratstvu i jedinstvu. Verovali smo u to i ponašali se u skladu sa time. Kasnije je trebalo da naučimo da mrzimo jedni druge. Ali, to nismo uspeli. Naš identitet iz mladosti ubijen je u jednom trenutku početkom devedestih.”
― Ljubiša Rajić, Dagbok fra Beograd