Jan > Jan's Quotes

“But sex as a physical act is merely athletics, a momentary relief. What it needs to be powerful is desire, and the strongest element of desire is longing. It's in the work. Desider-, sidus: from the stars. The longing that reaches beyond space and time.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Labyrinth of Desire: Women, Passion, and Romantic Obsession

“That is why in adult life, people generally tend to relive rather than live, that is, to repeat the patterns of the past and defend the primary fantasy in the defiance, and avoid the real gamble or real adventure of taking a chance on something new. They are afraid that if they really cry out, if they really ask, if they really scream for help, that it won't come, and they'll be in the same panicky frightened state they were in when they were little. ”
― Robert W. Firestone

“You don't read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.”
― Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I miss your fragrance, sometimes I miss it this much that I can clearly smell you in the air.”
― Qaisar Iqbal Janjua

“When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.”
― Florence Scovel Shinn

“if you run away your problems will run after you. Be undisturbed by a situation, and it will fall away of its own weight.”
― Florence Scovel Shinn, Wisdom of Florence Scovel Shinn

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
― Jim Rohn

“What is meant for you is always meant to find you. —Indian poet-saint Lalleshwari”
― Tosha Silver, Outrageous Openness: Letting the Divine Take the Lead

“The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears”
― David Whyte

“God is the same, even though He has a thousand names; it is up to us to select a name for Him.”
― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

“Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.”
― Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down, before they knew their endings.”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton

“It is a cruel, ironical art, photography. The dragging of captured moments into the future; moments that should have been allowed to be evaporate into the past; should exist only in memories, glimpsed through the fog of events that came after. Photographs force us to see people before their future weighed them down....”
― Kate Morton, The House at Riverton