Choobnam > Choobnam's Quotes

“On the surface, I was calm: in secret, without really admitting it, I was waiting for something. Her return? How could I have been waiting for that? We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them. The age-old faith of lovers and poets in the power of love, stronger than death, that finis vitae sed non amoris, is a lie, useless and not even funny. So must one be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox...

Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she had breathed? In the name of what? In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation. Since she had gone, that was all that remained. I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“There are friends with whom we share neither interests nor any particular experiences, friends with whom we never correspond, whom we seldom meet and then only by chance, but whose existence nonetheless has for us a special if uncanny meaning. For me the Eiffel Tower is just such a friend, and not merely because it happens to be the symbol of a city, for Paris leaves me neither hot nor cold. I first became aware of this attachment of mine when reading in the paper about plans for its demolition, the mere thought of which filled me with alarm.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“We didn't know each other well. I never had the time. Now I see that it doesn't make any difference. The ones who hurry and the ones who take their time all end up in the same place. Just don't have any regrets. No regrets.”
― Stanislaw Lem

“She was desperate and she was choosey
at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn't have quite enough going for her to become what
she imagined herself to be.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“the free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“Beauty is nothing, beauty won’t stay. You don’t know how lucky you are to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it’s for something else.”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“why don't we go back out there and tell them what happened?

because nothing happened except that everybody has been driven insane and stupid by life. in this society there are only two things that count: don't be caught without money and don't get caught high on any kind of high.

(Night Streets of Madness)”
― Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness

“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“آدم درد را از یاد می برد، اما خطر نزول درد را هرگز!‏”
― محمود دولت‌آبادی, جای خالی سلوچ

“بر روی هم آنچه دیده می‌شد اینکه همه چیز به هم خورده است. چیزی از میان رفته بود که باید می‌رفت؛ اما چیزی که باید جایش را می‌گرفت، همان نبود که می‌باید. سرگردانی. کلافگی.
ابراو با اینکه سود و زیانی چنان رویارو نداشت، احساس می‌کرد در توفان گم شده است. در بیابان گم شده‌ است. تکلیف خود را نمی‌فهمید. کار و روزگار خود را نمی‌فهمید. در حدود دلبندی‌هایش، رفتارش بر هم خورده بود. خلق و خویش تغییر کرده بود. نگاهش روی چیزها همان نگاه پیش از این نبود. خاک و خانه و برادر و مادر، جور دیگری برایش معنا می‌شدند. چیزی، حجم ثقیلی ترکیده بود، منفجر شده بود و تکه‌هایش در دود و خاک معلق بودند. تکه‌های معلق را نمی‌شناخت. تکه‌ها، اجزاء همان ثقل بودند؛ اما دیگر ثقل نبودند و پراکنده و بی‌هویت بودند. لابد هر کدام هویت تازه‌ای یافته بودند، اما ابراو نمی فهمیدشان. عباس بود، ابراو بود، هاجر بود، مِرگان بود و -شاید- سلوچ هم بود؛ این‌ها تکه‌های خانواده‌ی سلوچ بودند؛ اما هیچکدام خانواده‌ی سلوچ نبودند. هر کدام چیزی برای خود بودند. مردم زمینج تک به تک همان مردم بودند؛ اما مردم، دیگر همان مردم نبودند. کک سمجی به تنبان‌ها افتاده بود. آفتاب‌نشین‌ها راه شهرها را بلد شده بودند، خرده مالک‌ها در جنب و جوشی تازه بازی برد و باخت را می‌آزمودند. هر چه بود، زمینج پراکنده می‌شد. آرامش غبار گرفته‌ی دیرین بر هم خورده و کشمکشی تازه آغاز شده بود و می‌رفت تا جدالی تازه سر بگیرد. ء
(۳۸۸)”
― محمود دولت‌آبادی, جای خالی سلوچ

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day

“When Kafka allows a friend to understand that he writes because otherwise he would go mad, he knows that writing is madness already, his madness, a kind of vigilence, unrelated to any wakefulness save sleep's: insomnia. Madness against madness, then. But he believes that he masters the one by abandoning himself to it; the other frightens him, and is his fear; it tears through him, wounds and exalts him. It is as if he had to undergo all the force of an uninterruptable continuity, a tension at the edge of the insupportable which he speaks of with fear and not without a feeling of glory. For glory is the disaster.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

“When you need to be loved, you take love wherever you can find it. When you are desperate to be loved, feel love, know love, you seek out what you think love should look like. When you find love, or what you think love is, you will lie, kill, and steal to keep it. But learning about real love comes from within. It cannot be given. It cannot be taken away. It grows from your ability to re-create within yourself, the essence of loving experiences you have had in your life.”
― Iyanla Vanzant

“I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism. And to alter now, cleanly and sanely, I want to shuffle off this loose living randomness: people; reviews; fame; all the glittering scales; and be withdrawn, and concentrated.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary

“Thus I hope to have kept the sound of the sea and the birds, dawn and garden subconsciously present, doing their work under ground.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer's Diary: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”
― Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

“So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.”
― Sylvia Plath, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all.

As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“I think: there at the point where thought joins with me I am able to subtract myself from being, without diminishing, without changing, by means of a metamorphosis which saves me from myself, beyond any point of reference from which I might be seized. It is the property of my thought, not to assure me of existence (as all things do, as a stone does), but to assure me of being in nothingness itself, and to invite me not to be, in order te make me feel my marvelous absence. I think, said Thomas, and this visible, inexpressible, nonexistent Thomas I became meant that henceforth I was never there where I was, and there was not even anything mysterious about it. My existence became entirely that of an absent person who, in every act I performed, produced the same act and did not perform it.”
― Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

“ما همچون دانه هاي زيتوني هستيم كه تنها هنگامي جوهر خود را بروز مي دهيم كه در هم شكسته شويم”
― Bohumil Hrabal, تنهایی پرهیاهو

“من از خیلی چیز ها می ترسیدم : از مادیان سپید پدر بزرگ ، از مدیر مدرسه ، از نزدیک شدن وقت نماز ، از قیافه عبوس شنبه. چقدر از شنبه ها بیزار بودم . خوشبختی من از صبح پنجشنبه آغاز می شد . عصر پنجشنبه تکه ای از بهشت بود . شب که می شد در دور ترین خواب هایم طعم صبح جمعه را می چشیدم .”
― سهراب سپهری, هنوز در سفرم...