Irena > Irena's Quotes

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft...”
― Jim Morrison

“Books were, and always would be, something a little magic and something to respect.”
― Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

“Whoever knows you when you are young can look inside you and see the person you once were, and maybe still are at certain times.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites

“I only had access to him when we were together in the library, and I loved them both -the library and my father- equally and without question.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites

“A woman who knows what she wants, Adelle always told me, is likely to receive it.”
― Alice Hoffman, The Marriage of Opposites

“And now such a warm commotion, such busy love.”
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.
It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something which would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.
So, nothing now but what she or anybody else could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for, nothing secret, or strange.
Pay attention to this, she thought. She had a dramatic notion of getting down on her knees. This is serious...
It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old and new to bargaining.”
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“I did not understand why Alfrida looked at him with such a fiercely encouraging smile. All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future.”
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left”
― Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

“What's the point of wandering?
to find a better place?
a home?
But the loneliness will always capture me
in its claws
of no tomorrow”
― Asper Blurry, Train to the Edge of the Moon

“Most often when I stammer
That's my brain
Correcting my grammer.”
― Joyce Rachelle

“What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Om høsten

“Why do we feel sorry for people who can't travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can't multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“I have no problem with uninteresting or unoriginal people – they may have other, more important attributes, such as warmth, consideration, friendliness, a sense of humor or talents such as being able to make a conversation flow to generate an atmosphere of ease around them, or the ability to make a family function – but I feel almost physically ill in the presence of boring people who consider themselves especially interesting and who blow their own trumpets.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“It is not what we say that hurts but how we say it.”
― John Gray

“Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary.

Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.”
― Dereke Bruce

“In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“First find out what you are capable of, then decide who you are.”
― Tara Westover

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else. ”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

“To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?”
― Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon

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

“She had never been without a book for as long as she could remember. An only child never is.”
― Kate Atkinson, A God in Ruins