Mia > Mia's Quotes

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“It isn't possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free?”
― John Keats

“When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
― John Keats

“Touch has a memory.”
― John Keats

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
― John Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.”
― John Keats

“It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“LII.
For, if you think about it,
all first hatred of strangers

contains this idea of death,

of your death which will one day walk up to you
in just such a fashion.
Buon giorno, death will say.

LIII.
What is the holiness of conversation?

It is
to master death.”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest...”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

“Uma pessoa não vira adulta ao conseguir emprego, ao aceitar que a vida pode ser entediante, e que fazer o que detestamos durante oito horas por dia é parte integrante da experiência humana, não, não tem nada a ver com trabalho, viramos adultos quando pessoas da nossa idade morrem de forma absolutamente estúpida e podemos contemplar, com a lucidez necessária, a fragilidade e o absurdo da vida.”
― Antônio Xerxenesky, As Perguntas

“Sometimes he had the look in his eyes of a Delphic priestess on the hunt for visions.”
― Fleur Jaeggy

“When you reach the end of what you should know, you will be at the beginning of what you should sense.”
― Kahlil Gibrán, Sand and Foam

“My dearest Emma," said he, "for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour's conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma -- tell me at once. Say 'No,' if it is to be said." She could really say nothing. "You are silent," he cried, with great animation; "absolutely silent! at present I ask no more."

Emma was almost ready to sink under the agitation of this moment. The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream, was perhaps the most prominent feeling.

"I cannot make speeches, Emma," he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing. "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it. Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover. But you understand me. Yes, you see, you understand my feelings and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice.”
― Jane Austen, Emma