Mal Zhobin > Mal's Quotes

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.”
― Octavio Paz , The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature - if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature - consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“He is astonished at the fact of his being, and this astonishment leads to reflection: as he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own. The singularity of his being, which is pure sensation in children, becomes a problem and a question”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“History has the cruel reality of a nightmare, and the grandeur of man consists in his making beautiful and lasting works out of the real substance of that nightmare. Or, to put it another way, it consists in transforming the nightmare into vision; in freeing ourselves from the shapeless horror of reality--if only for an instant--by means of creation.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“...it becomes clear that chronometric time is a homogeneous succession lacking all particularity. It is always the same, always indifferent to pleasure or pain. Mythological time, on the other hand, is impregnated with all the particulars of our lives: it is as long as eternity or as short as a breath, ominous or propitious, fecund or sterile.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Therefore the fiesta is not only an excess, a ritual squandering of the goods painfully accumulated during the rest of the year; it is also a revolt, a sudden immersion in the formless, in pure being. By means of the fiesta society frees itself from the norms it has established. It ridicules its gods, its principles, and its laws: it denies its own self.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason. When we emerge, perhaps we will realize that we have been dreaming with our eyes open, and that the dreams of reason are intolerable. And then, perhaps, we will begin to dream once more with our eyes closed.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Progress has peopled history with the marvels and monsters of technology but it has depopulated the life of man. It has given us more things but not more being.”
― Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings

“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.”
― Octavio Paz

“Deserve your dream.”
― octavio paz

“Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival.”
― Octavio Paz, The Collected Poems, 1957-1987

“because two bodies, naked and entwined,
leap over time, they are invulnerable,
nothing can touch them, they return to the source,
there is no you, no I, no tomorrow,
no yesterday, no names, the truth of two
in a single body, a single soul,
oh total being...”
― Octavio Paz, Piedra de Sol = Sunstone

“I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.”
― Octavio Paz, An Erotic Beyond: Sade

“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
― Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma

“Merece lo que sueñas.”
― Octavio Paz, Libertad bajo palabra

“This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.”
― Octavio Paz, The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry

“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.”
― Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel

“A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.”
― Isaac Babel

“The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.”
― Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

"No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

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

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release life's rapture.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
― Vladimir Nabokov