Erinn > Erinn's Quotes

“because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music”
― Kundera Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“our dreams prove that to imagine-to dream about things that have not happened- is among mankind's deepest needs.”
― Kundera Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak have to be strong enough to leave.”
― Kundera Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“No one can get reall drunk on a novle or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven's night, Bartok's Sonata for two Pianos and percussion or the Beatles' White Album? He loved mozart as much as rock.
He considered music a liberating force, it liberated him from lonliness, introversion, the dust of the library; it opened the door of hi body and allowed his soul to step out into the world to make friends, He loved to dance an regretted that Sabina did not share his passion”
― Kundera Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“But the longer a man grows in his own darkness, the more his outer form diminishes”
― Kundera Milan, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Cemetaries in Bohemia are like gardens”
― Kundera Milan

“Physical love is unthinkable without violence”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Almost from childhood, she knew that a concentration camp was nothing exceptional or startling but something very basic, a given into which we are born and from which we can escape only with the greatest of efforts.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Indeed, the only truely serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naive of questions are truely serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set limits, describes the boundaries of human exsistence.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love begins with a metaphor, which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetice memory.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“...There was pleasure in Paradise but no excitement.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“This Forest eats itself and lives forever.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Some of us know how we came by our fortune and some of us don't; but we wear it all the same”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“So Noah cursed all Ham's children to be slaves forever and ever. That's how come them to turn out dark”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.
”
― Merce Cunningham

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“If I know what love is, it is because of you.”
― Hermann Hesse

“Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe

“I live in my dreams — that's what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That's the difference.”
― Herman Hesse, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend

“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols...”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“We are sun and moon, dear friend; we are sea and land. It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is: each the other's opposite and complement.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“He has robbed me, yet he has given me something of greater value . . . he has given to me myself.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
― W.H. Auden, Selected Poems

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”
― W.H. Auden

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”
― W.H. Auden

“I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems