Natalia > Natalia's Quotes

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."
"She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me.
"Moderately," Holly confessed....Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Everybody has to feel superior to somebody," she said. "But it's customary to present a little proof before you take the privilege.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“All literature is gossip”
― Truman Capote

“She had only one flaw. She was perfect, otherwise she was perfect.”
― Truman Capote

“She sounds the way bananas taste.”
― Truman Capote

“It's bad enough in life to do without something YOU want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want THEM to have.”
― Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“Nunc fluens facit tempus,
nunc stans facit aeternitatum.

(The now that passes produces time, the now that remains produces eternity.)”
― Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“Balance out the good things and the bad that have happened in your life and you will have to acknowledge that you are still way ahead. You are unhappy because you have lost those things in which you took pleasure? But you can also take comfort in the likelihood that what is now making you miserable will also pass away.”
― Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

“One's virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune.”
― Boethius

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun”
― Pablo Picasso

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”
― Henry Thomas Buckle

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity”
― T.S. Eliot

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”
― Louis Pasteur

“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it. If we want to allow it its freedom, we have to allow our ideational lives to be let loose, to stream, letting anything come, initially censoring nothing. That is creative life. It is made up of divine paradox. To create one must be willing to be stone stupid, to sit upon a throne on top of a jackass and spill rubies from one’s mouth. Then the river will flow, then we can stand in the stream of it raining down.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“When seeking guidance, don't ever listen to the tiny-hearted. Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Failure is a greater teacher than success”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“To act—that is true wisdom. I can be what I want to be, but I have to want whatever it is. Success consists in being successful, not in having the potential for success.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
― Fernando Pessoa

“We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“what has happened to us has happened to everyone or only us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose