Mina > Mina's Quotes

“But, of course, a thing is just a thing. [… ] the Count looked once more at what heirlooms remained and then expunged them from his heartache forever.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“But when all is said and done, I can’t help suspecting that grand things persist. […] I guess the point I’m trying to make is that as a species we’re just no good at writing obituaries. We don’t know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now, any more than we know what his great-great-grandchildren will be having for breakfast on a Tuesday in March. Because when Fate hands something down to posterity, it does so behind its back.”
― Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

“For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
― Towles, Amor

“Fundamentally, if you’re an organization that says “Our people are our greatest asset” (as most do), and you mean it, you must default to open. Otherwise, you’re lying to your people and to yourself. You’re saying people matter but treating them like they don’t. Openness demonstrates to your employees that you believe they are trustworthy and have good judgment. And giving them more context about what is happening (and how and why) will enable them to do their jobs more effectively and contribute in ways a top-down manager couldn’t anticipate.”
― Laszlo Bock

“You read much, Bernie?’ ‘More and more,’ I admitted. ‘And for me it’s like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.”
― Philip Kerr, If The Dead Rise Not

“You’ve got me confused with some kind of saint, Noreen. The kind who’s OK with being martyred as long as his halo’s straight in the photograph. If I’m going to throw myself to the lions, I want it to mean a lot more than just being remembered in some milkmaid’s prayers on a Sunday morning. I never was a man for a useless gesture.”
― Philip Kerr, If The Dead Rise Not

“His mother called it wallowing in the mud, and by that Ferguson supposed she meant the mud of their unhappiness, but sinking into that unhappiness could be eerily satisfying, he discovered, as long as you sank into it as far as you could and weren’t afraid to drown, and because the tears kept pushing them back into the past, they had protected them from having to think about the future, but then one day his mother said it was time to start thinking about it, and the crying came to an end.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens, for reading books that dwelled only on the familiar inevitably taught you things you already knew, and reading books that dwelled only on the strange taught you things you didn’t need to know, and what Ferguson wanted above all else was to write stories that would make room not only for the visible world of sentient beings and inanimate things but also for the vast and mysterious unseen forces that were hidden within the seen.”
― Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1

“Και δεν θα αφήσεις ποτέ στη ζωή σου, να σε κερνάνε οι άλλοι. Κι αν αναγκαστείς, τότε να βιαστείς να το ξεπληρώσεις. Τον τόπο που κάθεσαι πρέπει να τον αγοράζεις, κι όχι να σ´ αγοράζει.”
― Σκαμπαρδώνης

“There are moments which are made up of too much stuff for them to be lived at the time they occur.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function:”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“We've had enough." He took back the report and jammed it under his arm. "We've had a bellyful, in fact."
"And like everyone who's had enough," said Control as Alleline noisily left the room, "he wants more.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“There are always a dozen reasons for doing nothing," Ann liked to say--it was a favourite apologia, indeed, for many of her misdemeanours. "There is only one reason for doing something. And that's because you want to." Or have to? Ann would furiously deny it: coercion, she would say, is just another word for doing what you want; or for not doing what you are afraid of.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“there was no future: there was only a continued slide into still more terrifying versions of the present.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion;”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting.”
― John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

“Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“His yearning for new and faraway places, his desire for freedom, relief and oblivion was as he admitted to himself, an urge to flee-an urge to get away from his work, from the everyday site of a cold, rigid, and passionate servitude.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Because passion, like crime, does not like everyday order and well-being and every slight undoing of the bourgeois system, every confusion and infestation of the world is welcome to it, because it can unconditionally expect to find its advantage in it.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“...nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“(...) nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“His love of the sea had profound roots: the hardworking artist's desire to rest, his longing to get away from the demanding diversity of phenomena and take shelter in the bosom of simplicity and immensity; a forbidden penchant that was entirely antithetical to his mission and, for that very reason, seductive-a proclivity for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal: for nothingness.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“But he immediately felt he did not really want to take that step. It would lead him back, give his soul back to himself; but when one is frantic, the last thing one desires is to be oneself again.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Entangled and besotted as he was, he no longer wished for anything else than to pursue the beloved object that inflamed him, to dream about him when he was absent and to speak amorous phrases, after the manner of lovers, to his mere shadow.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“A dead man is the worst enemy alive, I thought. You can't alter his power over you. You can't alter what you love or owe. And it's too late to ask him for his absolution. He has beaten you all ways.”
― John le Carré, Our Game