madeleine > madeleine's Quotes

“Föhn

Blinde Klage im Wind, mondene Wintertage,
Kindheit, leise verhallen die Schritte an schwarzer Hecke,
Langes Abendgeläut.
Leise kommt die weiße Nacht gezogen,


Verwandelt in purpurne Träume Schmerz und Plage
Des steinigen Lebens,
Daß nimmer der dornige Stachel ablasse vom verwesenden Leib.


Tief im Schlummer aufseufzt die bange Seele,
Tief der Wind in zerbrochenen Bäumen,
Und es schwankt die Klagegestalt
Der Mutter durch den einsamen Wald


Dieser schweigenden Trauer; Nächte,
Erfüllt von Tränen, feurigen Engeln.
Silbern zerschellt an kahler Mauer ein kindlich Gerippe.”
― Georg Trakl

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“In ein altes Stammbuch

Immer wieder kehrst du Melancholie,
O Sanftmut der einsamen Seele.
Zu Ende glüht ein goldener Tag.


Demutsvoll beugt sich dem Schmerz der Geduldige
Tönend von Wohllaut und weichem Wahnsinn.
Siehe! es dämmert schon.


Wieder kehrt die Nacht und klagt ein Sterbliches
Und es leidet ein anderes mit.


Schaudernd unter herbstlichen Sternen
Neigt sich jährlich tiefer das Haupt.”
― Georg Trakl

“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person's life its true meaning.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage

“Vom Schatten eines Hauchs geboren
Wir wandeln in Verlassenheit
Und sind im Ewigen verloren,
Gleich Opfern unwissend, wozu sie geweiht.”
― Georg Trakl

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Je schöner die Landschaft, desto hässlicher die Leute. Bei Leuten handelt es sich umgangssprachlich bekanntlich um Personen, bei denen es fürs Menschsein nicht gereicht hat.”
― André Heller, Thomas Bernhard. Hab & Gut - Das Refugium des Dichters

“How wonderful it would be, frankly, if everybody in the world would suddenly lose his sight or forget the existence of light. Immediately, there would be agreement about form. Everybody would accept the fact that a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread whether triangular or round. The girl a little while ago would have kept her eyes shut and listened to my voice. If she had, perhaps we could have become friendly and I could have taken her to the playground and we could have eaten ice cream together. Just because there was light, she heedlessly thought that a triangular loaf of bread was not bread but a triangle. This thing called light is itself transparent, but it apparently changes into something nontransparent.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“We try to preserve life, even when we know it has no chance of enduring its body. We feed it, keep it comfortable, bathe it, medicate it, caress it, even sing to it. We tend to these basic functions not because we are brave or selfless but because, like breath, it is the most fundamental act of our species: to sustain the body until time leaves it behind.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Wehe, Sie lesen eindringlicher, Sie ruinieren sich alles, was Sie lesen. Es ist ganz gleich, was Sie lesen, es wird am Ende lächerlich und ist am Ende nichts wert. Hüten Sie sich vor dem Eindringen in Kunstwerke, sagte er, Sie verderben sich alles und jedes, selbst das Geliebteste.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy

“The expression is something like an equation by which we show our relationship with others. It's a roadway between oneself and others. If it's blocked by a landslide, even those who have been at pains to travel it will think you are now some uninhabited, dilapidated house and perhaps pass by.”
― Kōbō Abe, The Face of Another

“Die einzigen Freunde, die ich habe, sind die Toten, die mir ihre Literatur hinterlassen haben, ich habe keine anderen.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Have you ever lost someone you love and wanted one more conversation, one more chance to make up for the time when you thought they would be here forever? If so, then you know you can go your whole life collecting days, and none will outweigh the one you wish you had back.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“The truth is, once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I miss you more than I remember you.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Cleopatra saw the same sunset. Ain't that crazy? Like everybody who was ever alive only seen one sun.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn't have to live on one side or the other?”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What if my sadness is actually my most brutal teacher? And the lesson is always this: You don’t have to be like the buffaloes. You can stop.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“It must suck to be the sun, though. Cause you never see yourself if you're the sun. You don't even know where you are in the sky. Like you don't even know if you're round or square or even if you're guly or not. Like you can only see what you do to earth, the colors and stuff, but not who you are.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.”
― Stephen King, Lisey's Story

“In all diesen Momenten konnte ich beinahe zusehen, wie sich unsere Vergangenheit wieder zart mit unserer Gegenwart und Zukunft verknüpfte.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“Das Gegengift zu Einsamkeit ist Geborgenheit.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“Während ich mich in den Jahren davor im Innersten sicher gefühlt hatte, gab es nun Momente, in denen ich bemerkte, wie mattes Abendlicht in einen schummrigen Flur fiel oder wie die Bäume in der Dämmerung einen gespenstischen Schatten über die Landschaft breiteten, und dann zog sich plötzlich etwas in mir zusammen. Dass ich auf einem Planeten war, der mit unglaublicher Geschwindigkeit durchs All schoss, kam mir ebenso erschreckend vor wie der neue, verstörende Gedanke, dass es unvermeidlich war zu sterben. Wie ein sich ausbreitender Riss nahmen meine Ängste zu. Ich begann, mich vor dem Dunklen zu fürchten, vor dem Tod, vor der Ewigkeit. Diese Gedanken trieben einen Stachel in meine Welt, und je häufiger ich über all das nachdachte, desto mehr entfernte ich mich von meinen oft unbeschwerten, gutgelaunten Mitschülern. Ich war allein.”
― Benedict Wells, Vom Ende der Einsamkeit

“The alternative to the concept of life and death is the void’ – stalk waggling between her lips – ‘would it really be better if this world didn’t exist at all? Instead, we live, make art, love, observe, suffer, laugh and are happy. We all exist in a million different ways so that there is no void, and the price we pay for that is death.”
― Benedict Wells, The End of Loneliness