serial_jane > serial_jane's Quotes

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Читатели бывают разные. Вот почему плохой литературы больше, чем хорошей.”
― Борис Виан

“It's not their fault. It's because they've been taught that 'Work is holy, good and beautiful. It counts above everything else, and the workers alone will inherit the earth.' Only things have been arranged so that they have to spend all their time working and there's no time left for the rest of it to come true.”
― Boris Vian

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Pain or love or danger makes you real again....”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“We do not realize the extent of the energy we are losing until we find where it is seeping from.”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy

“How do people do it? How do they shut off the noise? And I don't mean "happy", they may not be happy, but they seem to be able to exist at least.”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy

“I had to be isolated, I had to not be something to someone or someone to something. I'd exhausted myself, trying with all of me to figure out what was wrong, running from one place to the next, fooling myself into thinking I could find it. But the answer was in the silence, the answer would only come when I chose to listen.”
― Elliot Page, Pageboy