Handan Ganic > Handan's Quotes

“The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

“I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a book. I saw the library as a temple.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre

“Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.
”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Genius is what a man invents when he is looking for a way out.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“emotion is first of all and in principle an accident”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory

“Once they have slept together they will have to find something else to veil the enormous absurdity of their existence.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“What's done at night belongs to the night. In the daytime you don't talk about it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, The Respectable Prostitute/Lucifer and the Lord/In Camera

“If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake you are no longer authentic.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Life itself is a quotation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

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

“I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me...”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories