Benu B > Benu's Quotes

“Earth's crammed with heaven...
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Do not allow me to forget you”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Of Love and Other Demons

“Don't let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
― Anita Desai

“The greatest book in the world, the Mahabharata, tells us we all have to live and die by our karmic cycle. Thus works the perfect reward-and-punishment, cause-and-effect, code of the universe. We live out in our present life what we wrote out in our last. But the great moral thriller also orders us to rage against karma and its despotic dictates. It teaches us to subvert it. To change it. It tells us we also write out our next lives as we live out our present.
The Mahabharata is not a work of religious instruction.
It is much greater. It is a work of art.
It understands men will always fall in the shifting chasm between the tug of the moral and the lure of the immoral.
It is in this shifting space of uncertitude that men become men.
Not animals, not gods.
It understands truth is relative. That it is defined by context and motive. It encourages the noblest of men - Yudhishtra, Arjuna, Lord Krishna himself - to lie, so that a greater truth may be served.
It understands the world is powered by desire. And that desire is an unknowable thing. Desire conjures death, destruction, distress.
But also creates love, beauty, art. It is our greatest undoing. And the only reason for all doing.
And doing is life. Doing is karma.
Thus it forgives even those who desire intemperately. It forgives Duryodhana. The man who desires without pause. The man who precipitates the war to end all wars. It grants him paradise and the admiration of the gods. In the desiring and the doing this most reviled of men fulfils the mandate of man.
You must know the world before you are done with it. You must act on desire before you renounce it. There can be no merit in forgoing the not known.
The greatest book in the world rescues volition from religion and gives it back to man.
Religion is the disciplinarian fantasy of a schoolmaster.
The Mahabharata is the joyous song of life of a maestro.
In its tales within tales it takes religion for a spin and skins it inside out. Leaves it puzzling over its own poisoned follicles.
It gives men the chance to be splendid. Doubt-ridden architects of some small part of their lives. Duryodhanas who can win even as they lose.”
― Tarun J. Tejpal, The Alchemy of Desire

“We went to places where we felt - like all lovers - that we were the first.
We discovered the body of a lover has secrets that never end.
We discovered that at times the same secrets reveal different truths.”
― Tarun J. Tejpal, The Alchemy of Desire

“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“Exasperation over our struggle in Vietnam should not close our eyes to the fact that we could have other missile crises in the future—different kinds, no doubt, and under different circumstances. But if we are to be successful then, if we are going to preserve our own national security, we will need friends, we will need supporters, we will need countries that believe and respect us and will follow our leadership.”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“One of the ironic things,” Kennedy observed to Norman Cousins in the spring of 1963, “…is that Mr. Khrushchev and I occupy approximately the same political positions inside our governments. He would like to prevent a nuclear war but is under severe pressure from his hard-line crowd, which interprets every move in that direction as appeasement. I’ve got similar problems…. The hard-liners in the Soviet Union and the United States feed on one another.”8”
― Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

“You make me thank god for every mistake I ever made, Because each one led me down the path that brought me to you.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“I remember only a day
that was perhaps never intended for me,
it was an incessant day,
without origins, Thursday.
I was a man transported by chance
with a woman vaguely found,
we undressed
as if to die or swim or grow old
and we thrust ourselves one inside the other,
she surrounding me like a hole,
I cracking her like a bell,
for she was the sound that wounded me
and the hard dome determined to tremble.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“The Truth is in the prolouge.
Death to the romantic fool.,
the expert in solitary confinement.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

“I am carried in my shadow
like a violin
in its black case”
― Tomas Tranströmer, For the Living and the Dead

“Dusk

I feel my heart melting
in the mildness like candles:
my veins are slow oil
and not wine,
and I feel my life fleeing
hushed and gentle like the gazelle.”
― Gabriela Mistral

“Success is loving life and daring to live it.”
― Maya Angelou

“Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood.”
― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“A man's past keeps growing, even when his future has come to a full stop.”
― Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower

“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

“To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”
― Federico García Lorca

“Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.”
― Federico García Lorca

“I am the immense shadow of my tears”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.”
― Federico García-Lorca

“I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads”
― Federico García Lorca

“Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.”
― Federico García-Lorca

“The night above. We two. Full moon.
I started to weep, you laughed.
Your scorn was a god, my laments
moments and doves in a chain.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.
Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the frozen spout
of unstaunched blood.
The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

- Night of Sleepless Love”
― Federico García-Lorca