Thought Mantique > Thought's Quotes

“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”
― Lawrence M. Krauss

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance—nothing more," says the twentieth-century philosopher-essayist Walter Benjamin. “But to lose oneself in a city—as one loses oneself in a forest—that calls for quite a different schooling.” To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“When I first began to write, I had been a child for most of my life, and my childhood memories were vivid and potent, and the forces that shaped me, Most of them have grown fainter with time, and whenever I write one down, I give it away: it ceases to have the shadowy life of memory and becomes fixed in letters: it ceases to be mine; it loses that mobile unreliability of the live.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas; what was and what is are different things.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“In the same way, teenagers imagine dying young because death is more imaginable than the person that all the decisions and burdens of adulthood may make of you.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and in the end what possesses you.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Is it that the joy that comes from other people always risks sadness, because even when love doesn't fail, mortality enters in; is it that there is a place where sadness and joy are not distinct, where all emotion lies together, a sort of ocean into which the tributary streams of distinct emotions go, a faraway deep inside; is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“For a while it was forever, and then things started to fall apart. There isn't a story to tell, because a relationship is a story you construct together and take up residence in, a story as sheltering as a house. You invent this story of how your destinies were made to entwine like porch vines, you adjust to a big view in this direction and no view in that, the doorway that you have to duck through and the window that is jammed, how who you think you are becomes a factor of who you think he is and who he thinks you are, a castle in the clouds made out of the moist air exhaled by dreamers. It's a shock to find yourself outdoors and alone again, hard to imagine that you could ever live in another house, big where this one was small, small where it was big, hard when your body has learned all the twists and turns of the staircase so that you could walk it in your sleep, hard when you have built it from scratch and called it home, hard to imagine building again. But you lit the fire that burned it down yourself.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt... The stories shatter. Or you wear them out or leave them behind. Over time the memory loses power. Over time you become someone else.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Todo se olvida en esta vida, todo pasa al recuerdo, todo acontecimiento deja de ser presente, pierde su valor y su significado.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Porque solamente alguien que se vacía puede ser llenado de nuevo. En el vacío está la luz del entendimiento.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Hija mía, vienes del agua, y el agua habla. Vienes del tiempo, y tu palabra estará en el viento y serás sembrada en la tierra. Tu palabra será el fuego que transforma todas las cosas. Tu palabra estará en el agua y será espejo de la lengua. Tu palabra tendrá ojos y mirará, tendrá oídos y escuchará, tendrá tacto para mentir con la verdad y dirá verdades que parecerán mentiras. Y con tu palabra podrás regresar a la quietud, al principio donde nada es, donde nada está, donde todo lo creado vuelve al silencio, pero tu palabra lo despertará y habrás de nombrar a los dioses y habrás de darle voces a los árboles, y harás que la naturaleza tenga lengua y hablará por ti lo invisible y se volverá visible en tu palabra. Y tu lengua será palabra de luz y tu palabra, pincel de flores, palabra de colores que con tu voz pintará nuevos códices.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“«La memoria», le dijo «es ver desde dentro. Es dar forma y color a las palabras. Sin imágenes no hay memoria».”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Los huipiles hablaban, decían muchas cosas de las mujeres que los habían tejido, hablaban de su tiempo, de su condición social, de su estado civil, de su conexión con el cosmos. Ponerse un huipil era toda una iniciación, al hacerlo uno repetía diariamente el viaje interior hacia el exterior. Al meter la cabeza por el orificio del huipil, uno transitaba entre el mundo de sueños que está reflejado en el bordado hacia la vida que aparece. En cuanto uno saca la cabeza, ese despertar a la realidad es un acto ritual matutino que recuerda día a día el significado del nacimiento. Los huipiles lo mantienen a uno con la cabeza en el centro, cubierta por delante, por atrás y por los costados. Esta cruz que forma la tela bordada del huipil significa estar plantada en el centro del universo, alumbrada por el sol y arropada por los cuatro vientos, los cuatro rumbos, los cuatro elementos.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“—Tu tarea es caminar —respondió la abuela—. Un cuerpo inmóvil se limita a sí mismo, un cuerpo en movimiento se expande, se vuelve parte del todo, pero hay que saber caminar ligero, sin cargas pesadas. Caminar nos llena de energía y nos transforma para poder mirar el secreto de las cosas. Caminar nos convierte en mariposas que se elevan y miran en verdad lo que el mundo es. Lo que la vida es. Lo que nuestro cuerpo es. Es la eternidad de la conciencia. Es la comprensión de todas las cosas. Eso es dios en nosotros, pero si quieres, puedes quedarte sentada y convertirte en piedra.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“La niña, con asombro, descubrió que el eco le regresaba las palabras. La abuela le explicó que por eso es tan importante honrar a la palabra. Cada sonido que emitimos navega por los aires, pero siempre viene de regreso a nosotros.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Un instante de paz donde todo se comprendía, donde todo tenía sentido, aunque no pudiera explicarse con palabras, pues no había lenguaje que lo pueda nombrar.”
― Laura Esquivel, Malinche

“Las personas que me encontraba y las anécdotas que me ocurrían conduciendo por aquella carretera eran tan normales y corrientes como las que podía encontrar cualquier persona en cualquier calle. Ni tenían nada de especial ni tampoco vale la pena dejar constancia de ellas. Ahora bien, Buda dijo en una ocasión que «Dos personas tienen que vivir cien vidas para coincidir en un mismo barco; y tienen que vivir mil vidas para acabar convirtiéndose en marido y mujer». De manera que no podía olvidar así como así la mano que había dado, la sonrisa que había intercambiado, la conversación que había mantenido... No podía dejar marchar volando todo aquello, a merced del viento, como mi falda. Aprendí, incluso, a querer cada grano de arena del desierto. No puedo olvidar cada amanecer ni cada puesta de sol, y mucho menos puedo borrar los rostros de mis recuerdos.”
― Sanmao

“Las personas somos realmente extrañas. Si no viene alguien de fuera a decirnos lo buenos que somos, parece que no seamos capaces de darnos cuenta del valor que tenemos.”
― Sanmao

“Los días empiezan por la mañana y al despertarnos nos pesa la carga de todo lo que nos espera durante la jornada. Saber que tenemos que encarar un día desconocido nos hace sentir nerviosos, en guardia. El crepúsculo es diferente, se trata del preludio de una noche cálida: es un momento liberador y cómodo, que nos enseña a disfrutar de la vida más dulce.”
― Sanmao

“Me gusta la soledad en su justa medida. Son los momentos más liberadores para el alma y siempre me cuesta disfrutarlos con otros. De hecho, es difícil compartir un tesoro tan personal. Incluso brota en mí una felicidad oculta cuando José se queda en casa mirando la televisión por voluntad propia. Disfrutar de las noches claras y tranquilas tendría que ser algo personal, a diferencia de comer, que es más interesante cuando se comparte con otros.”
― Sanmao, Diarios de las Canarias

“Soy una persona con muchos defectos, pero, en cambio, pocas virtudes. Los que me conocen bien se habrán dado cuenta de que, como me vuelco demasiado en cualquier trivialidad, cuando me toca lidiar con algo más importante me vuelvo más descuidada y estoy más distraída”
― Sanmao, Diarios de las Canarias

“Aunque llevaba muchos años fuera de casa, aún me resultaba bastante complicado controlar el dolor y las emociones que me asaltaban al tener que volver a alejarme de él nuevamente. (…) Hay que vivir intensamente todo lo que nos pasa en la vida, si no, es un aburrimiento. ¡Poder llorar siempre es buena señal!”
― Sanmao, Diarios de las Canarias