Divya Maniar > Divya's Quotes

“We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.”
― Pablo Neruda, Still Another Day

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I think, therefore I am is the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches. I feel, therefore I am is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive. My self does not differ substantially from yours in terms of its thought. Many people, few ideas: we all think more or less the same, and we exchange, borrow, steal thoughts from one another. However, when someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain. The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self. In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of egocentrism.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“I have a strong will to love you for eternity.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn't even know how to be dead.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.”
― Graham Greene , The Power and the Glory

“The woman had gone down on her knees and was shuffling slowly across the cruel ground towards the group of crosses: the dead baby rocked on her back. When she reached the tallest cross she unhooked the child and held the face against the wood and afterwards the loins: then she crossed herself, not as ordinary Catholics do, but in a curious and complicated pattern which included the nose and ears. Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith--faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead. The evening star was out: it hung low down over the edge of the plateau: it looked as if it was within reach: and a small hot wind stirred. The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity. The woman sat down, and taking a lump of sugar from her bundle, began to eat, and the child lay quiet at the foot of the cross. Why, after all, should we expect God to punish the innocent with more life?”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“They deserved nothing less than the truth--a vacant universe and a cooling world, the right to be happy in any way they chose.”
― Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

“I would give my life, that's nothing, my soul ... my dear, my dear, try to understand that you are—so important.”
― Graham Greene

“One reads alone, even in another's presence.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond...”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“We never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“…in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irresistible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him—in that moment his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy, but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for—that other people should love him—became at the moment of his achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred—in hating and in being hated.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“Not a visible enthusiasm but a hidden one, an excitement burning with a cold flame.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“She was indeed a girl of exquisite beauty. She was one of those languid women made of dark honey smooth and sweet and terribly sticky.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“Grenouille no longer wanted to go somewhere, but only to go away, away from human beings.”
― Patrick Suskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“Man’s misfortune stems from the fact that he does not want to stay in the room where he belongs.”
― Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

“As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Still, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It's when you can't even feel pain anymore that you're in real trouble.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage