AUTUMN > AUTUMN's Quotes

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?”
― Virginia Woolf

“make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Life was dynamic and vast, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to experience enough of it to feel satisfied, if she could die happy knowing she’d only gotten to rub up against the small corner of the world she lived in.”
― Karissa Chen, Homeseeking

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“And sometimes it seems clear to me that the normalcy most of us cling to so stubbornly—assuming it like a cloak against the changing weather—is also a paralysis. A blithe insistence on the continuity of daily life. It must go on, it can’t go on, it goes on.”
― Lydia Millet, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life

“To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in . . . If there is a Judgment Day, this was it.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“I return to English as if to the arms of a lover and feel instantly safe and indigenous there. What are borders, anyway? Just lines in the sand. What are citizens? Just people fucking within the same lines in the sand - and their children and then their children”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“But how does she know if she has been changed, or if she just so much wants to be changed that since it happened, she has been pretending?”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“I’m caught between my desire to understand and my desire to appear as though I already understand.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“A boat doesn’t get to its destination by current alone; it still requires steering. You have good opportunity luck right now, but not if you squander it.”
― Karissa Chen, Homeseeking

“She's 68 now, and although she knows the idea of being put out to pasture is a phrase others associate with obsolescence and redundancy, for her it conjures lushes green fields filled with buttercups where she's free to roam.”
― Florence Knapp, The Names

“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”
― Alan Watts