Nayusha > Nayusha's Quotes

“He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.”
― Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

“At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“on him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.”
― Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

“Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip’s body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in their midst. She recalls everything of that August day— what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of her going dark under the thunder.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Dreams are good for three things:
ALIF:
You want something but you just can’t ask for it. So you’ll say that you’ve dreamed about it. In this manner, you can ask for what you want without actually asking for it.

BA:
You want to harm someone. For example, you want to slander a woman. So, you’ll say that such-and-such woman is committing adultery or that such-and-such pasha is pilfering wine by the jug. I dreamed it, you’ll say. In this fashion, even if they don’t believe you, the mere mention of the sinful deed is almost never forgotten.

DJIM:
You want something, but you don’t even know what it is. So, you’ll describe a confusing dream. Your friends or family will immediately interpret the dream and tell you what you need or what they can do for you. For example, they’ll say: You need a husband, a child, a house…”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“You’ve got to enjoy yourself. The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. That’s how I look at it. Ask anybody, they’ll all tell you. The evening’s the best part of the day.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“I, his mistress, mad with grief, shall follow him...I shall share his glory. You speak of widowhood and deny me the white gown - the mourning of queens.”
― Jean Genet, The Maids

“What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“The trader trusts his fortune to the sea and takes his gains,
     The warrior, for his deeds, is girt with gold;
The wily sycophant lies drunk on purple counterpanes,
     Young wives must pay debauchees or they're cold.
But solitary, shivering, in tatters Genius stands
     Invoking a neglected art, for succor at its hands.”
― Petronius, The Satyricon

“She wished there was some place where she could go to hum it out loud. Some kind of music was too private to sing in a house cram fall of people. It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a crowded house.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“Man sieht eines im Laden, man trägt einen Traum fort. Dann kehrt man vielleicht um und kauft ? Was kauft man ? Die Sehnsucht bedarf keines Geldes, die Erfüllung ist es nicht wert.”
― Heinrich Mann, Professor Unrat

“She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate or harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable. Yes, imagination is the only good thing which heaven vouchsafes to the skeptic and pessimist, alarmed by the eternal abjectness of life.”
― Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“When Indians sleep, they really do sleep. Neither adults nor children have a regular bed-time -- when they're tired they just drop, fully clothed, on to their beds, or the ground if they have no beds, and don't stir again until the next day begins. All one hears is occasionally someone crying out in their sleep, or a dog -- maybe a jackal -- baying at the moon. I lie awake for hours: with happiness, actually. I have never known such a sense of communion. Lying like this under the open sky there is a feeling of being immersed in space -- though not in empty space, for there are all these people sleeping all around me, the whole town and I am part of it. How different from my often very lonely room in London with only my walls to look at and my books to read.”
― Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust

“Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“It is a strange time, the end of a war.” “Yes. A period of adjustment.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Viewed from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, the Veda is as dark as night, dense, with no apparent inclination toward clarity. It is a world that is self-sufficient, highly tensioned, even convulsive, wrapped up in itself, with no curiosity about any other manner of existence. Streaked by all kinds of violent desires, it has no thirst for objects, vassals, pomp. If we are looking for an emblem of something utterly alien to modernity (however it might be defined), something that might look upon it with complete indifference, we find it in the Vedic people.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“To rest was to receive all aspects of the world without judgement.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“No, she wanted me to beg her to do what she wanted to do. Like all women, she wanted me to offer her what she desired. I have been rolled.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Là-Bas

“Oh ! l'amour ! dit-elle, et sa voix tremblait, et son oeil rayonnait. C'est être deux et n'être qu'un. Un homme et une femme qui se fondent en un ange. C'est le ciel.”
― Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris

“What do you think dignity's all about?'

The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. 'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. 'But I suspect it comes down to not removing one's clothing in public.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.”
― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour

“Do you know what friendship is?' he asked. 'Yes,' answered the gipsy; 'it is to be brother and sister, two souls which meet without mingling, two fingers of one hand.' 'And love?' continued Gringoire. 'Oh, love!' said she, and her voice trembled and her eye brightened. 'That is to be two and yet but one. A man and a woman blended into an angel. It is heaven itself.”
― Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“As the Vedic ritualists say, man is the only one of the sacrificial victims who also celebrates sacrifices. It is essential to anticipate this question: why invent the highly complex ceremony of sacrifice, if in the end everything is to be reduced to dividing up pieces of meat? Here is the answer given by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa: the sacrificial victim shall be divided into thirty-six parts, because the bṛhatī meter consists of thirty-six syllables: “By dividing it in this way, the victim is made into a celestial being, whereas those who proceed in another way tear it apart like rogues or criminals.” And here we see the great role that meter plays in the Veda, as the primary articulation of form, as the first effective device for breaking away from the meaningless and arbitrary succession of existence. Here it is said, among other things, that “the bṛhatī is the mind.” And so, if the mind coils within itself the thirty-six fragments of the sacrificial victim, this alone is enough to transform those pieces of flesh into fragments of a whole that has a life of its own—and is perhaps also “a celestial being.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“The fact is, of course,’ I said after a while, ‘I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give, and now – well – I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man