Ameena > Ameena's Quotes

“What am I doing here in this endless winter?”
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

“One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I know only one thing. when i sleep, i know no fear, no, trouble no bliss. blessing on him who invented sleep. the common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. there is only one bad thing about sound sleep. they say it closely resembles death.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“A man writes because he is tormented, because he doubts. He needs to constantly prove to himself and the others that he’s worth something. And if I know for sure that I’m a genius? Why write then? What the hell for?”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“What is art? (...) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“I’m a witch. It’s what we do. When it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my business.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.”
― Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There are thousands of wines that can take over our minds. Don't think all ecstasies are the same!”
― Jalaluddin Rumi

“Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artists
job to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefs
shattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought and
emotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.
It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has been
done so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world
needs is to get shittier.”
― Jonathan Culver

“Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind.”
― John Lancaster Spalding

“None of us can choose where we shall love...”
― Susan Kay, Phantom

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan Watts

“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
― Alan Watts

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Culture of Counter-Culture: Edited Transcripts

“This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
― Alan Watts

“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts

“I remember that I'm invisible and walk softly so as not awake the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Everywhere I've turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only /they/ were the ones who benefited. And now we start on the old sacrificial merry-go-round. At what point do we stop?”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“You're very insistent, but I'm very busy.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man