Laura > Laura's Quotes

“No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“How slow life is, how violent hope is.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“Will the spellbound world die with you"

Will the spellbound world die with you
where memory hangs on
to clean breaths in life,
the white shadow of a first love,

a voice that struck your heart, the hand
you wanted to grab in dreams,
and every love
that fell in the soul down to the bottom sky?

Will your world die with you,
the old life you remade in your way?
Have the anvils and crucibles of your soul
been working for dust and wind?”
― Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems

“I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.”
― William Giraldi

“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“I dream that I have found us both again,
With spring so many strangers' lives away,
And we, so free,
Out walking by the sea,
With someone else's paper words to say....

They took us at the gates of green return,
Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why-
Do children meet again?
Does any trace remain,
Along the superhighways of July?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart. ”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“What is the most precious thing in the world? I see now that it is the knowledge that you have no part in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you, it always was and always will be, but let it not be done through you.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“So in our own poor hides and from our miserable comrades we learn the nature of satiety. Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“My wish for you... is that your skeptic-eclectic brain be flooded with the light of truth.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“In the realm of the unknown, difficulties must be viewed as a hidden treasure! Usually, the more difficult, the better. It's not as valuable if your difficulties stem from your own inner struggle. But when difficulties arise out of increasing objective resistance, that's marvelous!”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people.
But by one's inner self.
Everyone forges his inner self year after year.
One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being.
And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle

“On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which the pre-historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fist, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in . . . some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demand for total attention . . .”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“Information. What’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

“Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.”
“We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things…dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact…a film of grease you can’t even see, oil from the touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off—I’ve seen that happen…rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that’s all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“I like the idea of saying thank you on behalf of the weather.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.

The day you die.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“...he heard a sound that only a magnificent old bell could produce, a sound that seemed to roar forth with all the latent power of a distant world.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Beauty and Sadness

“It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice...”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

“Când cineva a fost scos o dată din viată şi a avut timpul şi calmul necesar ca să-şi puie o singură întrebare esenţială cu privire la dânsa - una singură - rămâne otrăvit pentru totdeauna... Desigur, lumea continuă să existe, dar cineva a şters cu un burete de pe lucruri importanţa lor...”
― Max Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate; Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată

“Există momente simple în realitate, clipe banale de singurătate, oriunde, pe stradă, când deodată aerul lumii se schimbă şi capătă brusc o nouă semnificaţie, mai grea şi mai obositoare.”
― Max Blecher, Inimi cicatrizate; Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată

“Vedeam bine oamenii din jurul meu,vedeam bine inutilitatea și plictiseala cu care își consumau viața,fetele tinere în grădină râzând stupid,negustorii cu privirile șirete și plină de importanță;necesitatea actoricească a tatălui meu de a-și juca rolul de tată;oboseala cruntă a cerșetorilor adormiți în unghere murdare;toate acestea se confundau într-un aspect general și banal,ca și cum lumea,așa cum era,aștepta de mult în mine,construită în forma ei definitivă,și eu,în fiecare zi,nu făceam alta decât să-i verific conținutul învechit în mine.”
― Max Blecher

“I feel that one day an authentic new truth will emerge from all this, a truth warm and intimate, capable of summarizing me clearly, like a name, and striking an entirely new, unique note in me, and it will be the meaning of my life...”
― Max Blecher, Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată

“Inutilitatea umplu scobiturile lumii ca un lichid ce s-ar fi răspândit în toate direcțiile,iar cerul deasupra mea,cerul veșnic corect,absurd și nedefinit,capătă culoarea proprie a disperării.
În inutilitatea aceasta care mă înconjoară și sub cerul acesta pe veci blestemat umblu încă și azi.”
― Max Blecher, Întâmplări în irealitatea imediată