Kiana's quotes

(showing 1-45 of 45)

"We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
"
— Paul Auster

22 people liked it

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book."
— Marcel Proust

tags: books, childhood, reading
27 people liked it

"It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for."
— Marcel Proust

tags: 1871-1922, french, writer
35 people liked it

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can never compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone? There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison."
— Milan Kundera

20 people liked it

"You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange."
— Milan Kundera

tags: love
379 people liked it

"You know, here, it's not forbidden to escape. It's forbidden to get caught. "
— Papillon

3 people liked it

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

tags: books, friends, friendship, life
3,870 people liked it

"If you can't change your fate, change your attitude."
— Amy Tan

tags: life
360 people liked it

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: drinking
672 people liked it

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: happiness
694 people liked it

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
— Ernest Hemingway

tags: sleep
377 people liked it

"To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
— Susan Sontag (On Photography)

tags: cameras, photography
29 people liked it

""To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!""
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

tags: rapture
33 people liked it

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: women
3,004 people liked it

"It is said that the darkest hour of the night comes just before the dawn."
— Paulo Coelho

117 people liked it

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."
— Carl Gustav Jung

tags: psychiatry, sanity
61 people liked it

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
— Carl Gustav Jung

tags: knowing-others, perception, self-awareness, understanding
67 people liked it

"Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event."
— Carl Gustav Jung

tags: connection, psychology
19 people liked it

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
— Carl Gustav Jung

20 people liked it

"Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen."
— Robert Bresson

5 people liked it

"I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally. "
— W.C. Fields

tags: humor, sinister
1,999 people liked it

"Whenever I feel the need to exercise, I lie down until it goes away."
— Robert Maynard Hutchins

tags: exercise, humor, laziness
5,842 people liked it

"Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"
— George Bernard Shaw

tags: sex
135 people liked it

"She had lived her early years as though she were waiting for something she might, but never did, become."
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

17 people liked it

"Stories only happen to those who are able to tell them."
— Paul Auster

30 people liked it

"(...) when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

21 people liked it

"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not."
— Paul Auster

18 people liked it

"All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are."
— Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies: A Novel)

12 people liked it

"Something happens, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise."
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)

4 people liked it

"The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this."
— Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude)

tags: memory, writing
10 people liked it

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"
— Virginia Woolf

tags: men, rescuing, women
345 people liked it

"I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street."
— Virginia Woolf

58 people liked it

"I have no mission. No one has."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

28 people liked it

"The greater the ambiguity, the greater the pleasure."
— Milan Kundera

tags: ambiguity
25 people liked it

"In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

53 people liked it

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

tags: books, humor
9,242 people liked it

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

tags: inspirational, optimism, perception, pessimism
4,958 people liked it

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

tags: lies, lying, trust
1,230 people liked it

"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
— Jane Austen

tags: friends, humor, people
2,201 people liked it

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories)

tags: sin
698 people liked it

"Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit."
— Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)

5 people liked it

"We have missed him in the sunshine, in the storm, in the twilight, ever since. "
— Paul Auster (Man in the Dark)

8 people liked it

"To feel estranged from language is to lose your own body."
— Paul Auster (Selected Poems)

3 people liked it

"Every life is inexplicable. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that they did this and did that, that they married this person and had these children, that they lived, that they died, that they left behind these books or this battle or that bridge--none of that tells us very much"
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy)

7 people liked it

"That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one's passion."
— Marguerite Duras (The Ravishing of Lol Stein)

10 people liked it

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