Inithan > Inithan's Quotes

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“I looked out of the window and saw him sitting in the early rays of the sun, a dark silhouette in the sand, motionless as a rock, and knew at once that I had substituted one memory for another and that this one would leave me with as little peace as the other one had. I would exist in someone else's mind, without knowing who I was in there.”
― Cees Nooteboom, Lost Paradise

“They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream”
― Ernest Dowson

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants, and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.”
― Walter Pater

“Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. ”
― Walter Pater

“Love is every bit as violent and dangerous as murder.”
― Knut Hamsun

“Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”
― Robert Hayden

“Rivers and the inhabitants of the watery elements are made for wise men to contemplate and for fools to pass by without consideration. ”
― Izaak Walton

“I am sore wounded but not slain
I will lay me down and bleed a while
And then rise up to fight again”
― John Dryden

“The days that make us happy make us wise.”
― John Masefield

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The library, to me, is the second most sacred physical space on the planet.”
― Nikky Finney

“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey”
― Kenji Miyazawa

“Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.”
― Oliver Wendall Holmes

“Humanity lives in its fiction.”
― Blaise Cendrars

“Find your quiet center of life and write from that to the world.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett

“ In actual life, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first step forward in faith. ”
― August Wilhelm von Schlegel

“A poet is not something you become; a poet is something you are.”
― Jack Prelutsky

“Sun and wind and beat of sea,
Great lands stretching endlessly...
Where be bonds to bind the free?
All the world was made for me!”
― Adelaide Crapsey

“The only joy in the world is to begin.”
― Cesare Pavese

“When you are old, at evening candle-lit
beside the fire bending to your wool,
read out my verse and murmur, "Ronsard writ
this praise for me when I was beautiful."
And not a maid but, at the sound of it,
though nodding at the stitch on broidered stool,
will start awake, and bless love's benefit
whose long fidelities bring Time to school.
I shall be thin and ghost beneath the earth
by myrtle shade in quiet after pain,
but you, a crone, will crouch beside the hearth
mourning my love and all your proud disdain.
And since what comes to-morrow who can say?
Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day.”
― Pierre de Ronsard, Sonnets pour Hélène

“I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.”
― H.L. Mencken

“I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it. ”
― Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

“Isn't it strange some people make
You feel so tired inside,
Your thoughts begin to shrivel up
Like leaves all brown and dried!
But when you're with some other ones,
It's stranger still to find
Your thoughts as thick as fireflies
All shiny in your mind!”
― Rachel Field

“Into the dark night
Resignedly I go,
I am not so afraid of the dark night
As the friends I do not know,
I do not fear the night above
As I fear the friends below.”
― Stevie Smith, Selected Poems of Stevie Smith

“The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take joy.”
― Girolamo Savonarola

“They seek him here, they seek him there
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That demned elusive Pimpernel”
― Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.”
― Horace Walpole