Sabina > Sabina's Quotes

“Nobody can claim the name of Pedro,
nobody is Rosa or María,
all of us are dust or sand,
all of us are rain under rain.
They have spoken to me of Venezuelas,
of Chiles and Paraguays;
I have no idea what they are saying.
I know only the skin of the earth
and I know it has no name.”
― Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― E.F. Schumacher

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.”
― Dorothy Thompson

“Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.”
― Francis Bacon

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”
― Pablo Neruda

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”
― David Foster Wallace

“The search for truth is more precious than its possession.”
― Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

“Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
― W.S. Merwin

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
― Mark Twain

“Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
― Mark Twain (Author)

“Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.”
― Mark Twain

“I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.”
― Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 1, Reader's Edition

“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“When in doubt, throw doubt out and have a little faith....”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exuper

“La beauté qui parle aux yeux, reprit-elle, n’est que le prestige d’un moment; l’œuil du corps n'est pas toujours celui de l'âme."

("The beauty that addresses itself to the eyes," she continued, "is only the spell of the moment; the eye of the body is not always that of the soul.")

[Le beau Laurence]”
― George Sand, Pierre qui roule

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“It's like the Tibetan Wheel of the Passions. As the wheel turns, the values and feelings on the outer rim rise and fall, shining or sinking into darkness. But true love stays fastened to the axle and doesn't move.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Wherever there's hope there's a trial.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Writing is prayer.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity.”
― Franz Kafka