Alireza > Alireza's Quotes

“Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“عاقبت روی بالش‌ها دراز کشید، مثل این بود که دیگر رمقی برایش نمانده است و درِ هر امیدی به رویش بسته شده است. صورتش را به صورت پریده‌رنگ و بی‌حرکت راگوژین چسباند و اشک از چشم‌هایش بر صورت او جاری شد. شاید اصلا متوجه گریستن خود نبود و از اشک‌هایش هیچ خبر نداشت...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Well, you'll never plant your lance in my back
as I flee you in fear-plunge it through my chest
as I come charging in, if a god gives you the chance!”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while dry leaves are blowing.”
― Reiner Maria Rilke

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“It all ends in tears anyway.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Indeed — why should I not admit it? — in that moment, my heart was breaking.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.”
― Terry Eagleton, How to Read Literature

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.”
― Stéphane Mallarme

“The old dreams were good dreams; they didn't work out but I'm glad I had them.”
― Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County

“I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one’s head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“هرچه قضاوت آنها درباره من سخت بوده ‌باشد نمی‌دانند که من پیشتر خودم را سخت‌تر قضاوت کرده‌ام”
― صادق هدایت, زنده به‌گور

“I write only for my shadow which is cast on the wall in front of the light. I must introduce myself to it.”
― Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“one of Lorca’s best lines is, “agony, always agony…” think of this when you kill a cockroach or pick up a razor to shave or awaken in the morning to face the sun.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

“Mythology has accepted him, images he cannot really believe in, images brief as dreams. The sweat rolls down his arms. He tumbles into the damp leaves of love, he rises clean as air. There is nothing about her he does not adore. When they are finished, she lies quiet and limp, exhausted by it all. She has become entirely his, and they lie like drunkards, their bare limbs crossed. In the cold distance the bells begin, filling the darkness, clear as psalms.”
― James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

“The more clearly one sees this world, the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.”
― James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime