Anjali Varma > Anjali's Quotes

“We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are you.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Twenty years was yesterday, and yesterday was just earlier this morning, and morning seemed light-years away.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Zwischen Immer und Nie. Zwischen Immer und Nie. Between always and never.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Cor cordium, heart of hearts, I’ve never said anything truer in my life to anyone.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

“The road up and the road down is one and the same.
(ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή)
—Fragment 60”
― Heraclitus, Fragments

“I’ve always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
― Mark Twain

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
― Albert Einstein, Living Philosophies

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv'd but three summer days - three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats, Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The man on top of the mountain didn't fall there.”
― Vince Lombardi

“What is an "I", and why are such things found (at least so far) only in association with, as poet Russell Edson once wonderfully phrased it, "teetering bulbs of dread and dream" -- that is, only in association with certain kinds of gooey lumps encased in hard protective shells mounted atop mobile pedestals that roam the world on pairs of slightly fuzzy, jointed stilts?”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“I can't help but recall, at this point, a horribly elitist but very droll remark by one of my favorite writers, the American "critic of the seven arts", James Huneker, in his scintillating biography of Frédéric Chopin, on the subject of Chopin's étude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, which for me, and for Huneker, is one of the most stirring and most sublime pieces of music ever written: “Small-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it.”

"Small-souled men"?! Whew! Does that phrase ever run against the grain of American democracy! And yet, leaving aside its offensive, archaic sexism (a crime I, too, commit in GEB, to my great regret), I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Hueneker's' shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitos, fight bacteria with antibiotics, and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog, and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul" but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is — and that, no more and no less, is why we "men" feel that we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not feel a trace of guilt while doing so.”
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”
― Heraclitus

“The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the
opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
― Sun Tzu

“I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

and:

No one can stop the river of your hands,
your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest.
You are the trembling of time, which passes
between the vertical light and the darkening sky.

and:

From the stormy archipelagoes I brought
my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain,
the habitual slowness of natural things:
they made up my wild heart.”
― Pablo Neruda

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God … Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation … Geometry is God Himself.” In”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
― Isaac Newton

“The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ

“Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.”
― Max Ehrmann

“The old African proverb says, ‘The ax forgets; the tree remembers.’ I saw how horrifically it injured us to identify with our oppressors. If we were to keep our souls whole, we couldn’t afford to forget. We had to remember.”
― Tavis Smiley, My Journey with Maya

“You must immerse yourself in an unfamiliar world in order to truly understand your own.”
― Nany diaries