Marina > Marina's Quotes

“You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.”
― Julio Cortazar

“THE FATHER: But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words. Each one of us has within him a whole world of things, each man of us his own special world. And how can we ever come to an understanding if I put in the words I utter the sense and value of things as I see them; while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the conception of things each one of you has within himself. We think we understand each other, but we never really do.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author

“My heart was a hysterical unreliable organ.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.”
― Nabokov Vladimi, Lolita

“The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you―on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck―even then. And afterwards―perhaps most of all afterwards―I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B... without looking, or, without lifting the pencil... or in some other way... we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after. ”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“In memory, everything seems to happen to music.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Being disappointed is one thing and being discouraged is something else. I am disappointed but I am not discouraged.”
― Tennessee Williams , The Glass Menagerie

“Go, then! Go to the moon-you selfish dreamer!”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“People go to the movies instead of moving.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, ban, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with brief, deceptive rainbows.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I'll be all right in a minute, I'm just bewildered - by life...”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Possess your soul in patience - you will see!”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“Why, you’re not crippled, you just have a little defect — hardly noticeable, even! When people have some slight disadvantage like that, they cultivate other things to make up for it — develop charm — and vivacity — and — charm!”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“I have a poet's weakness for symbols.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“In quoting others, we cite ourselves.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds