Macana > Macana's Quotes

“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!”
― Henry Scott Holland, Death is Nothing at All

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“As for methods of prayer, all are good, as long as they are sincere.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“There is will in the thought, there is none in the dream. The dream, which is completely spontaneous, takes and keeps, even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our mind. Nothing springs more directly and more sincerely from the very bottom of our souls than our unreflected and indefinite aspirations towards the splendours of destiny. ”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are found only in the depths of thought.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“На света има само две достойнства, на които можем и трябва да се прекланяме — това са гениалността и искрената доброта”
― Victor Hugo

“Надо иногда слегка побранить то, что нас очаровывает. Это брюзжание и называется благоразумием.”
― Victor Hugo

“Uostalom, ne zna se ništa, ni o osobama, niti predmetima, jednostavno nikada se ne može videti neka stvar ili osoba u svojoj celokupnosti, ako vidiš nečije lice, ne možeš ga videti s leđa, vidljivost je uvek delimična, sasvim otprilike.”
― Paolo Sorrentino, Hanno tutti ragione

“She had not really a sensitive soul, but to put it in exact terms, was possessed by an uncontrollable feeling of mind”
― Alessandro Baricco, Ocean Sea

“You smiled and talked to me of nothing and I felt that for this I had been waiting long.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“Men can only think. Women have a way of understanding without thinking. Woman was created out of God's own fancy. Man, He had to hammer into shape.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World

“happiness is like those stars. They don't cover all the darkness; there are gaps between. We make mistakes in life and we misunderstand, and yet there remain gaps through which truth shines.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Mashi and Other Stories

“I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I fused the beauty of dreaming and the reality of life into a single blissful colour..

...On a clear bright day even the softness of the sounds is golden...”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I’m riding a tram and, as is my habit, slowly absorbing every detail of the people around me. By ‘detail’ I mean things, voices, words. In the dress of the girl directly in front of me, for example, I see the material it’s made of, the work involved in making it – since it’s a dress and not just material – and I see in the delicate embroidery around the neck the silk thread with which it was embroidered and all the work that went into that. And immediately, as if in a primer on political economy, I see before me the factories and all the different jobs: the factory where the material was made; the factory that made the darker coloured
thread that ornaments with curlicues the neck of the dress’ and I see the different workshops in the factories, the machines, the workmen, the seamstresses. My eyes’ inward gaze even penetrates into the offices, where I see the managers trying to keep calm and the figures set out in the account books, but that’s not all: beyond that I see into the domestic lives of all those who spend their working hours in these factories and offices...A whole world unfolds before my eyes all because the regularly irregular dark green edging to a pale green dress worn by the girl in front of me of whom I see only her brown neck.

‘A whole way of life lies before me.
I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked just so that this woman in front of me on the tram should wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth.
I grow dizzy. The seats on the tram, of fine, strong cane, carry me to distant regions, divide into industries, workmen, houses, lives, realities, everything.
I leave the tram exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I've perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I'm forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“As adults our life is reduced to giving alms to others and receiving them in return. We squander our personalities in orgies of coexistence.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Every spoken word double-crosses us. The only tolerable form of communication is the written word, since it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We are judged... not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.”
― Stephen O'Connor, Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Sia i baci del destino sia i suoi manrovesci illustrano la fondamentale impotenza personale di ogni individuo sugli eventi veramente significativi della sua vita: cioè, quasi nessuna delle cose importanti ti accade perché l’hai progettata così. Il destino non ti avverte; il destino sbuca sempre da un vicolo e, avvolto nell’impermeabile, ti chiama con un Pss che di solito non riesci neppure a sentire perché stai correndo da o verso qualcosa di importante che hai cercato di pianificare.”
― DFW

“Kiss your own fingertips
and hug your own curves.
You are made of waves and honey
and spicy peppers when it is necessary.
You are a goddess,
I hope you haven’t forgotten.”
― -Emery Allen