Tara > Tara's Quotes

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.”
― Milan Kundera

“Science is magic that works.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“I'm not a drug salesman. I'm a writer."

"What makes you think a writer isn't a drug salesman?”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Americans... are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“Empathetic silence is one of the most underused weapons in the world.”
― Gillian Flynn, The Grownup

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wild lands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Time doesn't seem to pass here: it just is.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

“A disciplined mind leads to happiness, and an undisciplined mind leads to suffering.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

“I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings.”
― H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau

“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. It is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“There is a beauty in the world, though it's harsher than we expect it to be.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“That is what we do. That is what people do. They stay alive for each other.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours