Ayla M. > Ayla's Quotes

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“I feel like a part of my soul has loved you since the beginning of everything.
Maybe we’re from the same star.”
― Emery Allen

“Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed e subito sera

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world,
pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and suddenly it’s evening”
― Salvatore Quasimodo, Tutte le poesie

“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”
― Ernest Hemingway

“You will never find time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.”
― Charles Buxton

“I look at you and see all the ways a soul can bruise, and I wish I could sink my hands into your flesh and light lanterns along your spine so you know there's nothing but light when I see you.”
― Shinji Moon

“Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Did I want him to act? Or would I prefer a lifetime of longing provided we both kept this little Ping-Pong game going: not knowing, not-not-knowing, not-not-not-knowing? Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can't say "yes," don't say "no," say "later." Is this why people say "maybe" when they mean "yes," but hope you'll think it's "no" when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.”
― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I Swear Somewhere This Works

In a parallel universe or another world
or a different life,

we sit across from each other

at the kitchen table

and go over
the grocery
list.”
― Trista Mateer, The Dogs I Have Kissed

“She drowned in words that could not teach her how to swim.”
― Marilyn French, The Women's Room

“Despite how open, peaceful, and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they've met themselves. This is the heart of clarity.”
― Matt Kahn

“I prefer by far the warmth and softness to mere brilliancy and coldness. Some people remind me of sharp dazzling diamonds. Valuable but lifeless and loveless. Others, of the simplest field flowers, with hearts full of dew and with all the tints of celestial beauty reflected in their modest petals.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 2: 1920-1923

“Soon our conversations spilled out of the night's confinement. I surprised myself with how much there was to say, about everything, the beach and dinner and one boy or another.

I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion's tail hidden in his words. He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart?”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I can smell him. The oils that he uses on his feet, pomegranate and sandalwood; the salt of clean sweat; the hyacinths we had walked through, their scent crushed against our ankles. Beneath it all is his own smell, the one I go to sleep with, the one I wake up to. I cannot describe it. It is sweet, but not just. It is strong but not too strong. Something like almond, but that still is not right. Sometimes, after we have wrestled, my own skin smells like it.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“Every band is a foreign country, with its peculiar customs and dialects, slang and standards. But every band is also (when it works) a small business, a romance, an employer/employee dynamic, a hierarchy, a creative collaboration, and something between a family—siblings or cousins, sometimes literally—and a gang.”
― Franz Nicolay, The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar