Paulin's quotes

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"Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed."
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

3 people liked it

"Dear Leonard. To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

16 people liked it

"I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue."
— Pablo Neruda

tags: love, poetry
212 people liked it

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by frost."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: frost, glitter, gold, lost, poetry, roots, strength, strong, wander, wither
6,114 people liked it

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

tags: memories
251 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
4,925 people liked it

"I can resist anything, except temptation."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: temptation
345 people liked it

"Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life"
— Pablo Neruda

101 people liked it

"Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

tags: desire, love
20 people liked it

"This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, Well, why don’t you turn him in? And the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. Well I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd but I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs."
— Woody Allen

24 people liked it

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time."
— Haruki Murakami

tags: love
146 people liked it

"Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
— Pablo Neruda (Love: Ten Poems By Pablo Neruda)

tags: love
207 people liked it

"homesickness is just a state of mind for me. i'm always missing someone or someplace or something, i'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. my life has been one long longing."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

47 people liked it

"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative."
— Woody Allen

11 people liked it

"It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you.... you've got to find an answer to the question: Why go on?"
— Woody Allen

9 people liked it

"If you should ask me where I've been all this time
I have to say "Things happen."
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration:
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead?"
— Pablo Neruda (Residence on Earth/Residencia en la Tierra)

3 people liked it

"Very early in my life it was too late."
— Marguerite Duras (The Lover)

27 people liked it

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close."
— Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

tags: love
191 people liked it

"I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen."
— Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary)

7 people liked it

"Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. "
— Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)

tags: first-sentence
5 people liked it

"To you, I'm an atheist.
To God, I'm the loyal opposition."
— Woody Allen

tags: absurd, atheism, humor
366 people liked it

"She was one of those people who was born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother's sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor- was consuming herself."
— Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)

7 people liked it

"Actually last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little angora crop top told me he was gay a sex addict a narcotic addict a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo."
— Helen Fielding

7 people liked it

"There is just this for consolation: an hour here or there, when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined , though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning, we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

26 people liked it

"Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter."
— Elizabeth Wurtzel

tags: depression, nation, prozac
16 people liked it

"Writing is a constant exercise in longing."
— Isabel Allende

12 people liked it

"Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

34 people liked it

"The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights. "
— Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)

tags: elizabeth, nation, prozac, wurtzel
25 people liked it

"The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night."
— Isabel Allende

tags: books
109 people liked it

"Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine."
— Honoré de Balzac

tags: loneliness, society, solitude
31 people liked it

"Tomorrow is fresh, with no mistakes in it."
— L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)

tags: beginnings, fresh-start, inspirational, mistake, mistakes, new-day, start-over, tomorrow
135 people liked it

"Resist much. Obey little."
— Walt Whitman

tags: poetry
397 people liked it

"They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them."
— Gaston Leroux (The Phantom of the Opera: The Original Novel)

tags: game, hearts, opera, phantom
7 people liked it

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: intelligence, self-deprecation
7,395 people liked it

"I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: creation, god, humor, man
776 people liked it

"I never travel without my diary. One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
— Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)

tags: books, humor
508 people liked it

"The heart was made to be broken."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: heartbreak, love
504 people liked it

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

tags: reading
2,975 people liked it

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

tags: love
1,527 people liked it

"Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own)

tags: freedom, women, writing
419 people liked it

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."
— Virginia Woolf

tags: life, peace
1,164 people liked it

"She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape."
— Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)

tags: words
22 people liked it

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

tags: enemies, forgiveness, strategy
5,976 people liked it

"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)

tags: family, friends, parties, social
955 people liked it

"To live is to war with trolls."
— Henrik Johan Ibsen

tags: conflict, fighting, life, trial, trolls, war
13 people liked it

"I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse."
— Mario Puzo (The Godfather)

35 people liked it

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
— Douglas Adams

tags: deadlines, humor, work
5,265 people liked it

"If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger--

If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early--

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless--

If such things have not been part of your own experience, you probably won't understand what Bastian did next."
— Michael Ende (The Neverending Story)

5 people liked it

"....that as long as we are being remembered, we remain alive."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow Of The Wind)

tags: inspirational, truth
25 people liked it

"The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever."
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

tags: love
32 people liked it

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