Efrat > Efrat's Quotes

“The sun is touching every door
and making wonder of the wheat.

The first wine is pink in colour,
is sweet with the sweetness of a child,
the second wine is able-bodied,
strong like the voice of a sailor,
the third wine is a topaz, is
a poppy and a fire in one.

My house has both the sea and the earth,
my woman has great eyes
the colour of wild hazelnut,
when night comes down, the sea
puts on a dress of white and green...”
― Pablo Neruda, On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons. It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Bedtime stories
Eventide Rhapsodies
Anthologies of Memory
Please enter cautiously and feel free to open what is closed”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent”
― Victor Hugo

“Don’t care what anyone tells me. The future’s vinyl,’ he said ... Life has surface noise! Do you want to listen to furniture polish?”
― Rachel Joyce, The Music Shop

“Let us look for secret things somewhere in the world, on the blue shore of silence or where the storm has passed, rampaging like a train...”
― Pablo Neruda, On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea

“There was a downpour coming; Avery could feel it. The wind was already gaining strength, tearing out the last of her hairpins, whipping her dress close to her body. The air was heavy with the scent of rain.”
― Katharine McGee, The Thousandth Floor

“Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not “if only.” Not “as long as.” I matter equally. Full stop.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
― Mary Oliver

“Speak, memory, that I may not forget the taste of roses, nor the sound of ashes in the wind; That I may once more taste the green cup of the sea.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“Sonder - n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.”
― John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
― Mary Oliver

“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”
― Jamie Tworkowski

“During the rainstorms of April the oyster rises from the sea and opens its shell - rain enters it - when it sinks the raindrops become the pearl. So take a picnic,
open your body, and give birth to pearls. ⠀”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“Yes we have learned to fly the air like birds, we’ve learned to swim the seas like fish, and yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers and sisters.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“You are one of my nicest thoughts.”
― Georgia O'Keeffe

“I question travellers
from the four corners of the earth
hoping to meet one
who has breathed your fragrance.”
― Abu Bakr At-Turtushi

“Do the day and let the day do you.”
― Stephen King, Duma Key

“From Odes and Burgeonings:

Oh love, your body rises
like the pure line of a goblet
from the earth that knows me
and when my senses found you
you throbbed as though within you
rain and seeds were falling...”
― Pablo Neruda

“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
― A.A. Milne, The Complete Tales of Winnie-the-Pooh

“Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand--and melting like a snowflake...”
― Sir Francis Bacon

“I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope...”
― Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption

“So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).
Wine. Armchair. Raining. Or reading in the same room as someone else who's reading. It's rare, but there's a particular sort of peace to it.”
― Phoebe Waller-Bridge

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.

Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness

“He sleeps, though fate for him was truly odd.
He lived. He died when his angel was gone.
The thing just happened of its own accord
As night comes on when day is gone.”
― Victor Hugo