David Dontele > David's Quotes

“That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Try to remember it always," he said once Gogol had reached him, leading him slowly back across the breakwater, to where his mother and Sonia stood waiting. "Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Pet names are a persistant remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Remember that you and I made this journey together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Sexy means loving someone you do not know.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, and that the distance between them was now infinite, unyielding. ”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth

“And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

“Do what I will never do.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“Remember it always. Remember that you and I made this journey and went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri

“In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war,”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

“...learning was an act of rediscovery, knowledge a form of remembering.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“With children the clock is reset. We forget what came before”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“There was the anxiety that one day would not follow the next, combined with the certainty that it would.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“Most people trusted in the future, assuming that their preferred version of it would unfold.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail. They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri

“Too much information, and yet, in her case, not enough. In a world of diminishing mystery, the unknown persists.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“love is blind
and lovers cannot see
the pretty follies
that themselves commit”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason?
I am a Jew.
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,dimensions, senses, affections, passions?
Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?
If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge.
If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?
Why, revenge.
The villany you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“The moon shines bright: in such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,
And they did make no noise, in such a night,
Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls,
And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents,
Where Cressid lay that night.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“The day will come
When my body no longer exists
But in the lines of this poem
I will never let you be alone

The day will come
When my voice is no longer heard
But within the words of this poem
I will continue to watch over you

The day will come
When my dreams are no longer known
But in the spaces found in the letters of this poem
I will never tired of looking for you”
― Sapardi Djoko Damono