Nastassja > Nastassja's Quotes

“Hay que ser sublime sin interrupción”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Sections in the bookstore

- Books You Haven't Read
- Books You Needn't Read
- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading
- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written
- Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered
- Books You Mean to Read But There Are Others You Must Read First
- Books Too Expensive Now and You'll Wait 'Til They're Remaindered
- Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback
- Books You Can Borrow from Somebody
- Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
- Books You've Been Planning to Read for Ages
- Books You've Been Hunting for Years Without Success
- Books Dealing with Something You're Working on at the Moment
- Books You Want to Own So They'll Be Handy Just in Case
- Books You Could Put Aside Maybe to Read This Summer
- Books You Need to Go with Other Books on Your Shelves
- Books That Fill You with Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
- Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time to Re-read
- Books You've Always Pretended to Have Read and Now It's Time to Sit Down and Really Read Them”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“She was perfect, pure maddening sex, and she knew it, and she played on it, dripped it, and allowed you to suffer for it.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Extinction

“Casi todo el mundo se avergüenza de su juventud, no es muy cierto que se añore como se dice, más bien se relega o rehúye y con facilidad o esfuerzo se confina el origen a la esfera de los malos sueños, o de las novelas, o de lo que no ha existido. La juventud se oculta, la juventud es secreta para quienes ya no nos conocen jóvenes.”
― Javier Marías, A Heart So White

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“You don't need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don't ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.

But here rise the stubborn continents. The shelves of gravel and the cliffs of rock break from water baldly into air, that dry, terrible outerspace of radiance and instability, where there is no support for life. And now, now the currents mislead and the waves betray, breaking their endless circle, to leap up in loud foam against rock and air, breaking....

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.”
― Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
― Virginia Woolf

“We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad. Through the years these roles would reverse, then reverse again, until we came to accept our dual natures. We contained opposing principles, light and dark.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

“Me preguntó entonces si no me interesaba un cambio de vida. Respondí que nunca se cambia de vida, que en todo caso todas valían igual y que la mía aquí no me disgustaba en absoluto.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“-¿Hay algo más aburrido que la historia del pasado? -dijo Therese sonriendo.
-Quizá un futuro sin historia.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Soy rubia. Rubísima. Soy tan rubia que me dicen: "Mona, no
es sino que aletee ese pelo sobre mi cara y verá que me libra
de esta sombra que me acosa". No era sombra sino muerte lo
que le cruzaba la cara y me dio miedo perder mi brillo.”
― Andres Caicedo

“I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.”
― Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems, 1937-1952

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream.”
― John Cheever

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“I don't know a better preparation for life than love of poetry and a good digestion”
― Zona Gale

“We sit in the mud, my friend, and reach for the stars.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons

“I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
― C.S. Lewis