Iván > Iván's Quotes

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“I'm sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world, a few of which, only, we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know, and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Most of the supposed expressions of our feelings merely relieve us of them by drawing them out of us in an indistinct form that does not teach us to know them.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“El arte es un don que repara el alma de los fracasos y sin sabores. Nos alienta a cumplir la utopía a la que fuimos destinados.”
― Ernesto Sábato, La resistencia

“—Pero sí, pavo. Justamente te haría mal porque te quiero ¿no comprendes? Uno no hace mal a la gente que le es indiferente. Pero la palabra querer, Martín, es tan vasta... Se quiere a un amante, a un perro, a un amigo...
—¿Y yo? —preguntó temblando Martín—, ¿qué soy para vos? ¿Un amante, un perro, un amigo?...
—Te he dicho que te necesito, ¿no te basta?”
― Ernesto Sábato

“Las debilidades son lo único bueno que tenemos. Es aburrido ser fuerte, y muy agradable flaquear a solas... y entre dos”
― Luis Spota, Casi el paraíso

“we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more, nor less.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you.”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There

“Better say nothing at all. Language is worth a thousand pounds a word!”
― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There

“In a world where billions believe their deity conceived a mortal child with a virgin human, it's stunning how little imagination most people display.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Life's greatest comfort is being able to look over your shoulder and see people worse off, waiting in line behind you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“We'll never be as young as we are tonight.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“What if reality is nothing but some disease?”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Some people are just born human, the rest of us, we take a lifetime to get there.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

“Reading can be dangerous.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless emptiness.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“La intensidad de una pasión se mide por la soledad que la precede.”
― Xavier Velasco, Diablo Guardián