Natalia Kandybin > Natalia's Quotes

“There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction...For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Well, pray if you like, only you'd do better to use your judgment.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I want to leave a mark.

But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You should never ask anyone for anything. Never- and especially from those who are more powerful than yourself.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

“Doubt … is an illness that comes from knowledge and leads to madness.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Memoirs of a Madman

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Так же и вы не будете замечать Москвы, когда будете жить в ней. Счастья у нас нет и не бывает, мы только желаем его.”
― Антон Чехов, The Three Sisters

“She did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously.”
― Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

“I understood for the first time that I didn't understand what I thought I understood”
― Seiji Ozawa, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful...and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
― Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“As Duke Ellington once said, “There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind.” In that sense, jazz and classical music are fundamentally the same. The pure joy one experiences listening to “good” music transcends questions of genre.”
― Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

“I find people confusing.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“In this huge world there are some beautiful, happy families where parents and children maintain a close, warm relationship—a situation about as frequent as hat tricks in soccer. I have no confidence at all that I could be one of these rare happy parents, and can’t see Tokai doing it either.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

“Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.”
― Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men