Tilde Aune > Tilde's Quotes

“Fjärilar skola veta att dö medan solen skiner.”
― Lagerlöf Selma, The Story of Gösta Berling

“Hon hade lärt sig älska kärleken med all dess plåga, dess tårar, dess längtan .
- Bättre sorgsen med den än glad utan den, sade hon.”
― Selma Lagerlöf, Gösta Berling's Saga

“Standing alone in the face of infinity, it’s not your beliefs but what you have rejected that bothers you.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Islands are mindless chatter in a meditative ocean.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Water swept into the cracks, a trickle turned into a stream, streams turned into rivers. And then there was no turning back.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“That rains can turn into fossils, ones that can only be heard not seen, is an interesting thought. It is worth dreaming about.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Only a fool would consider the shores of continents, sandbanks, and parched patches the ends to the unbroken surface of water. At best, they are breaks and pauses. Or mindless chatter. Islands are mindless chatter in a meditative ocean.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“you have loved him in many lives. Some spirits bridge the gap between different worlds through love. It keeps us all together.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“The most dangerous criminals are those who inspire others to commit crimes yet themselves stand back and watch,”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Of what use are a dead man’s poems to this world?” the Poet asked.
“None. Which is why I can translate them freely.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“He witnessed water’s birth as ice, as he stood on one of Saturn’s moons, enraptured by the blizzards. He blinked with icy lashes as he saw the world through her eyes. Like a newborn who perceives it all as one being, she saw the stars and orbits as her limbs. He followed her journey to earth, couched in the ribs of a meteor. He saw her grow into the mightiest ocean the planet would ever see. Standing on the fringes of an atoll, he was hit by glassy waves, rhythmically drenching his calves, wetting his thighs and waist as he walked in deeper, until he was entirely submerged in her tale. She nurtured life in her womb, parasites committed to the blasphemy of evolution—a ceaseless separation, never to come together again.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Sitting in the garden, watching a hibiscus sun set over an emerald-green archipelago, leaves the couple unsettled. It forces them to swim in the solitary world of thoughts, preoccupations, and visions. Yet it doesn’t feel lonely.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Disbelief, it turns out, is belief of its own kind.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“What is the purpose of belief if even god can't put the world back the way you worshipped it ?”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Disbelief, it turns out, is belief of its own kind. It is a river that flows against the overbearing currents of time and truth to make the opposite journey. It gathers all the mysteries of the ocean and returns them to their frozen origins. In the form of a glacier, it holds its head high up to look at god hiding behind the mists of heaven. What is the purpose of belief if even god can’t put the world back the way you worshipped it?”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Ghosts do not live where they died. They return to the place where they felt the most alive. They have struggled, lived and enjoyed their time there so much, they cannot let go.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Hidden amongst the cluck and hiss, the croak and chatter outside the window, are songs of the extinct. The epic of evolution, told by bards long gone. Oh, to abandon the labyrinthine shell and shed old skin. To be naked and vulnerable. Free to swim, sprint and fly without inhibition. To vanish without a trace only to reappear as a mating call, the way the sun sets in the west and rises in the east … Can their stories and songs be heard by the living, they wonder. Do they acknowledge their legacy in the fossils?”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Nostalgia, it seemed, was a being with short-term memory. It yearned for things that were quickly receding, but rarely for the distant past.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“We were strolling in the jungle that surrounds the Lilliputian volcanoes in the Middle Andamans. I found your mother stroking the trunk of a palm tree. It was a Corypha Macropoda in its final stages of life. Once it flowers, it dies. She asked me why it happened. It was how trees had evolved, I explained to her. Some had gone from producing hundreds of seeds with a diminished chance of survival to flowering only once but ensuring the seeds made it by giving them their best … Now I realize why she asked me that question. Your mother wanted me to know the answer. As a human being, I cannot look beyond life and death. But as a botanist, I see how limiting individual lifecycles can be to our understanding. Nature is a continuum. That is how it thrives.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“Memory was life reflected in a shattered mirror. Ever since the Burman’s death, Mary had held on to him only in shards. Though the features were clear enough in her memory, she could never see the face in its entirety.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“What is it your friend Marx says? That philosophers can talk about the world in many ways but no one can change it?”
“No. He says that philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“My name is not Sah. Call me Odenigbo.'
'Yes, sah.'
'Odenigbo will always be my name. Sir is arbitrary. You could be the sir tomorrow.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“An old man crawls on the roof, risking the only thing he still has, his life, to feed himself. Below him live men much younger, listening to the radio, watching TV or sleeping. They’ve sold their wives and children. They can’t stand the heat with their shirts on,’ says Plato. ‘That’s the contrast. That’s what turns life into art.”
― Shubhangi Swarup, Latitudes of Longing

“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it "quite sophisticated," which veredict was her euphemism for "inhumanly boring.”
― Thomas Mann, Tristan

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees
and changing leaves.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse