Florin Spătaru > Florin's Quotes

“May you live every day of your life.”
― Jonathan Swift

“Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
― Aaron Levenstein

“I like being myself. Myself and nasty.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“《Marea e duhovnicul meu.》- ce mult îmi place această frază a Elisabetei de Austria!”
― Emil Cioran, Caiete I

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Dar câte crisalide mor fără să ajungă la ultima fază, fără să spargă coconul, nelăsând să iasă fluturele din el! Anima, anima, sufleţel drag… Multicolor, sprinţar, efemer – şi minunat. Cât de multe fiinţe rămân însă larve până la moarte, fără să înţeleagă că n-o să ajungă niciodată la maturitate!”
― Ludmila Uliţkaia

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”
― Groucho Marx

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

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

“This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”
― Stephen King, Different Seasons

“Am căzut, fiindcă m-ai smuls Tu din Tine,
Pentru că m-ai zvârlit am căzut...
Aşa strigă toată eternitatea din mine.
Umple-mă cu păcat, umple-mă cu ruşine,
Sfânt am fost, sfânt rămân, ca la început,
Vina mea s-a iscat în lut.
Eu, a patra-ţi ipostază, ţip din ruine:
Cine, Doamne, mă va pune la loc? Cine?
Nu dragoste, nu milă, nu iertare,
Vreau dumnezeiasca mea stare,
Dă-mi-o, dă-mi înapoi ceea ce am avut,
Întregeşte-mă şi întregeşte-te Doamne iar cu mine.
(De Profundis)”
― Vasile Voiculescu

“If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?”
― Jerry Seinfeld

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The first person you should be careful not to fool is yourself. Because you are the easiest person to fool".”
― Richard Feynman

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Știam să-i găsesc buzele și știam să i le sărut. Capetele noastre fugeau unul de celălalt: se căutau. Gurile noastre se sfâșiau una pe alta. Mâinile mele se închideau cu toată forța în palmele ei. Buzele mele alunecau încet pe gâtul ei, deși ce îmi doream de fapt, era să îmi înfig dinții în pielea aceea.”
― José Luís Peixoto, Cemitério de Pianos

“să mă lase să fac pluta în singurătatea mea cosmică”
― Lavinia Braniște, Escapada

“There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The sun was prying up the clouds and lighting the brick front of the hospital rose red. A thin breeze worked at sawing what leaves were left from the oak trees, stacking them neatly agains the wire cyclone fence. There were little brown birds occasionally on the fence: when a puff of leaves would hit the fence the birds would fly off with the wind. It looked at first like the leaves were hitting the fence and turning into birds and flying away.”
― Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Men lie the most,

women tell the biggest lies.”
― Chris Rock

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“And what about a person's life? How do you make a map of that? The borders people draw between themselves. The scars left along the ground of one's heart.”
― Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake