Debojit Dutta > Debojit's Quotes

“I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.”
― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”
― Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Memory believes before knowing remembers.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

“Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.”
― Michael Ondaatje

“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”
― Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

“They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale

“This wallpaper is dreadful, one of us will have to go.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Life is too short to learn German”
― Oscar Wilde

“Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
Don’t walk behind me… I may not lead
Walk beside me… just be my friend”
― Albert Camus

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but
I shall go on living.”
― Pablo Neruda

“I can write the saddest poem of all tonight. I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“I loved you: and, it may be, from my soul
The former love has never gone away,
But let it not recall to you my dole;
I wish not sadden you in any way.

I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain;
I loved you so tenderly and truly,
As let you else be loved by any man. ”
― Alexander Pushkin

“Now that you're there, where everything is known—tell me:
What else lived in that house besides us?”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.”
― Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

“Real loneliness is not necessarily limited to when you are alone.”
― Charles Bukowski

“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

“The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.”
― William Faulkner

“If a black cat crosses your path, it signifies that the animal is going somewhere.”
― Groucho marx

“Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
”
― Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all others were making ships.”
― Charles Simic

“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”
― Lautreamont