josee > josee's Quotes

“We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise.
In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

“She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Les oreilles des vieillards ne sont-elles pas de vrais coquillages constamment lavés par le flot et pleins de sagesse ?”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“In fear and pity I saw before me his big, beautiful body, hollow of sperm and eternally sad, and I was overcome with dread like a prophet whose mission had become clear to him, I had been chosen to fill the void in his body, to penetrate the smooth, dark, beloved skin and be swallowed up in the dark void as in an ancient cave, never to see the sunlight again.”
― Zeruya Shalev, Love Life

“I don't care about anything but you, and that's enough for the present. I want you to be happy--not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I'm near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That's not the deepest thing; there's something deeper.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est l’autre solitude : celle qui est comme la gale, qui se lit dans le regard, se trahit dans la démarche et les mouvements, qui marque la peau. Celle que chacun – femme, enfant, garçon de café – perçoit. Et qui les fait immédiatement reculer car, pour eux, celui qui en est atteint est dangereux.”
― Sándor Márai

“I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people's lives.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Sunday had spread all over the city. It looked as if the sun had smacked into the earth and broken into pieces and chunks of wet light were scattered everywhere -- in the streets, on the window panes, on puddles and roofs. I remembered a day long ago when Grandmother had cleaned a big fish. Her forearms were splattered with shiny scales. It was as if she had Sunday in her whole body. When my father got angry, he had Tuesday.”
― Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

“And no one knew what was in store for the dead, he said, perhaps nothing at all but perhaps, on the other hand, there was something, probably a great boredom, he said, a deathly boredom.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

“People living alone get used to loneliness.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“And Ippolito too, in his own way, had been a real person, even though he had come to that insect-like end.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

“Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.”
― Ethel Lina White, The Lady Vanishes

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Slack your rope, Hangsaman,
O slack it for a while,
I think I see my true love coming,
Coming many a mile”
― Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

“La peur, plus contagieuse encore que la peste, se communique en un clin d'œil. Tous se découvrirent des péchés qu'ils n'avaient même pas commis.”
― Nikolai Gogol

“When you're older you'll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It's better to be cold and young than to love. It's happened to me before but never like this - so accidental - just when everything was going well.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.”
― Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It has always been my opinion, you know, that princesses are confined in towers only because they choose to stay confined, and the only dragon required to keep them there was their own desire to be kept.”
― Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman

“Elle aurait voulu le savoir plongé dans la passion comme dans une mer : que l’eau palpite sourdement à ses oreilles, que ses yeux se ferment, que les mouvements de son corps soient instinctifs, désespérés, inconscients.”
― Mihail Sebastian

“Autour de lui il n'y avait que de l'insaisissable. de l'impalpable. ô combien impalpable !”
― Nikolai Gogol

“There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I could not understand how people could not like something as beautiful as the aerodrome. But I had lately become convinced that in general people were pretty boring. They liked to moan for hours on end about how hard it was to make ends meet, about the money they owed, the price of food, and other similar worries, but the minute some more brilliant or attractive subject come up, they were struck deaf.”
― Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone

“Tu sais, je viens juste de voir que c'est l'automne et pourtant il y avait des tas de feuilles mortes dans la rue pour me le dire. Je ne pourrai pas poser mes lèvres sur tes bras avant le printemps.
Triste,non ?”
― Mihail Sebastian, La ville aux acacias

“Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy -- one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night