Nikhar Yadav > Nikhar's Quotes

“We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles.”
― Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“The future is called "perhaps", which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you.”
― Tennessee Williams, Orpheus Descending

“...the sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head...”
― Primo Levi

“And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes-how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

“Every loneliness is a pinnacle”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.”
― Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

“The rest of my days I'm going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I'm going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.”
― Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

“To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn’t
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It’s not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.”
― Anne Carson, Red Doc>

“Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.”
― Anne Carson

“You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule.”
― Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
― Adrienne Rich

“I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons”
― Adrienne Rich

“Power


Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. ”
― Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

“When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.”
― Adrienne Rich

“We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“When you are young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close -- as close as you can get -- to another person only makes clear that impassable distance between you.'
If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?'
Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again.”
― Nicole Krauss

“You are free and that is why you are lost.”
― Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.”
― Kafka, Franz

“How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.”
― William C. Faulkner

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
― Anne Sexton

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.
Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.”
― Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“Under the seams runs the pain.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“Caught between the tongue and the taste.”
― Anne Carson

“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

“I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can’t start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn’t say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.”
― Anne Carson