Jane Botten

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I agree with Proust in this, he says, that books create their own silences in ways that friends rarely do. And the silence that grows palpable when one has finished a canto of Dante, he says, is quite different from the silence that grows palpable when one has reached the end of Oedipus at Colonus. The most terrible thing that has happened to people today, he says, is that they have grown frightened of silence. Instead of seeking it as a friend and as a source of renewal they now try in every way they can to shut it out... the fear of silence is the fear of loneliness, he says, and the fear of loneliness is the fear of silence. People fear silence, he says, because they have lost the ability to trust the world to bring about renewal. Silence for them means only the recognition that they have been abandoned... How can people find the strength to be happy if they are so terrified of silence?”
― Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak

“It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“A journey need not be long, in terms of time, to turn everything upside down. A day or two in a strange place can change your life”
― Jan Kjærstad, The Conqueror