Patty > Patty's Quotes

“We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.”
― Elie Wiesel

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The thing about getting older is that you don't need everything to be possible any more, you just need things to be certain.”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Approach everything rationally, and you become harsh. Pole along in the stream of emotions, and you will be swept away by the current. Give free rein to your desires, and you become uncomfortably confined. It is not a very agreeable place to live, this world of ours.”
― Sōseki Natsume, The Three-Cornered World

“A game: say something. Close your eyes and say something. Anything, a number, a name. Like this (she closes her eyes): Two, two what? Two women. What do they look like? Wearing black. Where are they? In a park. . . . And then, what are they doing? Try it, it's so easy, why don't you want to play? You know, that's how I talk to myself when I'm alone, I tell myself all kinds of stories. And not only silly stories: actually, I live this way altogether.”
― Andre Breton, Nadja

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don't throw it away.”
― Stephen Hawking

“Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
― Gustav Flaubert

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“How slow life is, how violent hope is.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.”
― Sir Thomas Browne

“Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never get used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder.”
― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.”
― Gregory Corso

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”
― André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism

“It is on a day like this one,
a little later a little earlier
that you descover without surprise
that something is wrong
that you don't know how to live
and you will never know”
― Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.”
― Georges Perec, L'infra-ordinaire

“Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.”
― Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

“Is it possible, after all, that in spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, can not resolve?”
― Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities

“Solitude, my mother, tell me my life again.”
― O.V. de L. Milosz

“Courage, Love, Illusion (or dream, if you will) -- he who possesses all three, or two, or at least one of these things wins whatever there is to win; those who lack all three are the failures.”
― Edward Lewis Wallant, The Tenants of Moonbloom