Linh > Linh's Quotes

“Say the sea. Say the sea. Say the sea. So that perhaps a drop of that magic may wander through time, and something might find it, and save it before it disappears forever. Say the sea. Because it's what we have left. Because faced by the sea, we without crosses, without magic, we must still have a weapon, something, so as not to die in silence, that's all.”
― Alessandro Baricco

“Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
― Milan Kundera

“They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitious occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unfortettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.”
― Milan Kundera

“While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.”
― Milan Kundera

“For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap-and-lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening of the cheeks.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I got my heart's desire, and there my troubles began.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magicians

“Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“What is honor compared to a woman's love? What is duty against the feel of a newborn son in your arms . . . or the memory of a brother's smile? Wind and words. Wind and words. We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“There is no creature on earth half so terrifying as a truly just man.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Life, then will, always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.”
― James Wood, How Fiction Works

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Et l'amour, où tout est facile,
Où tout est donné dans l'instant;
Il existe au milieu du temps
La possibilité d'une île.”
― Michel Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

“Il n’y a pas d’art pessimiste… L’art affirme.”
― Nietzsche

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
― Rumi, Masnavi i Man'avi, the spiritual couplets of Maula

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in you.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Foolish is my happiness, and foolish things will it speak: it is still too young—so have patience with it!”
― Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”
― W.B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

“Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being