Sara > Sara's Quotes

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Words, words, word. Once, I had the gift. I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups of clay. Love that overthrows empire. Love that binds two hearts together, come hellfire & brimstone. For sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery. But now -- I have lost my gift. It's as if my quill is broken, as if the organ of my imagination has dried up, as if the proud -illegible word- of my genius has collapsed.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Dr. Armonson stitched up her wrist wounds. Within five minutes of the transfusion he declared her out of danger. Chucking her under the chin, he said, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets."

And it was then Cecilia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: "Obviously, Doctor," she said, "you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused. Sitting on the porch, you could feel it: the air wishing it was water.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“..it's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world...It makes you mean, and violent, and cruel.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“هیچ کاری بی معنی تر از این نیست که بخواهی برای کسی که برایش مهم نیستی از خودت بگویی”
― فریبا وفی

“داشتم از این شهر می رفتم
صدایم کردی
جا ماندم
از کشتی ای که رفت و غرق شد
البته
این فقط می تواند یک قصه باشد
در این شهر دود و آهن
دریا کجا بود
که من بخواهم سوار کشتی شوم و
تو صدایم کنی
فقط می خواهم بگویم
تو نجاتم دادی
تا اسیرم کنی”
― رسول یونان

“یوسف گفت:"حرف اساسی من این بود که بهشان گفتم به این آسانی که شما خیال می‌کنید نیست. گفتم مارکسیسم یا حتی سوسیالیسم شیوهٔ فکری مشکلی است که تعلیم و تربیت دقیق می‌خواهد. گفتم تطبیق آن با زندگی و روحیه و روش اجتماعی ما، مستلزم پختگی و وسعت نظر و فداکاری بی‌حد و حصری است. گفتم می‌ترسم نمایشی با بازیگران ناشی روی صحنه بیاورید، چند صباحی، به علت وجود بازیگران تازه و حرف‌های تازه‌ترشان، عده‌ی زیادی را به خود جلب کنید، اما زود غالب تماشاگران و بازیگران را ناامید و خسته و دلزده و واخورده کنید. من گفتم روشندلی لازم است تا بتوان با روشنفکری و بی‌دخالت غیر، برای مردم این مملکت کاری کرد...”
― Simin Daneshvar, Suvashun

“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

“آن دوره که مردم به شراباَ طهورا دسترسی پیدا میکردند و میخوردند و حافظ می شدند گذشت. حالا باید شراباَ باروت قورت بدهند. آن وقت ها که مردم لب جوی آب می نشستند و گذر عمر را میدیدند و دلی دلی میکردند و از تمام تعمت های دنیا، یک گلعذار بسشان بود گذشت. راستی، اسم نعره هایی که آدم از ته دل بر می آورد چه بود؟ کلمه ای بود که به این جور فریاد میخورد... باید لغتی باشد که معنای سوراخ کردن بدهد. یعنی آدم اگر نتواند در برابر سیل و صاعقه و سیلی زندگی آن جور فریاد را بزند، دلش سوراخ میشود.”
― Simin Daneshvar, Suvashun

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you've felt that way.”
― Charles Bukowski

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“You have to die a few times before you can really
live.”
― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last