Magda > Magda's Quotes

“Like anybody can tell you, I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have
always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don't like the clean-shaven
boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth
and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and
explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and
sloppy mascara faces. I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with
bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be
shaped by society.”
― Charles Bukowski, South of No North

“Die slowly

He who becomes the slave of habit,
who follows the same routes every day,
who never changes pace,
who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,
who does not speak and does not experience,
dies slowly.

He or she who shuns passion,
who prefers black on white,
dotting ones "it’s" rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,
that turn a yawn into a smile,
that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,
dies slowly.

He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,
who is unhappy at work,
who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,
to thus follow a dream,
those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,
die slowly.

He who does not travel, who does not read,
who does not listen to music,
who does not find grace in himself,
she who does not find grace in herself,
dies slowly.

He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,
who does not allow himself to be helped,
who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,
dies slowly.

He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, he or she who don't reply when they are asked something they do know,
die slowly.

Let's try and avoid death in small doses,
reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.

Only a burning patience will lead
to the attainment of a splendid happiness.”
― Martha Medeiros

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Love. The reason I dislike that word is that it means too much for me, far more than you can understand."

- Anna Karenina {Anna Karenina}”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”
― Marcel Proust

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”
― Marcel Proust

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”
― Marcel Proust

“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

“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
― Émile Zola

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
― Alain de Botton

“One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”
― Alain de Botton

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
― Alain de Botton

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
― John Steinbeck

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

“For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.”
― William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby