Daphne > Daphne's Quotes

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Live to the point of tears.”
― Albert Camus

“An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought together?" This is a practical question. We must get down to it. "I despise intelligence" really means: "I cannot bear my doubts.”
― Albert Camus

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Although only breath, words which I command are immortal.”
― Sappho

“I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Here is the faithful night, the cool night which I called for amid the noise of lights, drink and the tumult of desire.”
― Albert Camus, The Sea Close By

“But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are – they’re yours to uncover and stand behind – so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?’
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say.”
― Daphne duMaurier, Rebecca

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”
― Annie Dillard

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“the feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead in a prospect of inconjecturable magic”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.”
― C.P. Cavafy

“We are described into corners, and then we must describe ourselves out of corners.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Why was she dancing? No reason. Just alive, I guess.”
― George Saunders, Tenth of December

“How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.”
― Jostein Gaarder, The Solitaire Mystery

“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”
― John Keats

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
― Albert Einstein, The World As I See It

“I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.”
― Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven

“When I desire you a part of me is gone...”
― Anne Carson

“Desire is no light thing.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red