Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.”
― Marcel Proust

“How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”
― Edmond de Goncourt

“I have even begun to speak in foreign tongues roaming like a nomad in my own town.”
― W.G. Sebald, Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001

“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”
― Edmond De Goncourt

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”
― Vladimir Lenin

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“I know of a cure for everything: salt water...in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
― Karen Blixen

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“…the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”
― W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“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

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“Se aprendesse qualquer coisa, necessitaria aprender mais, e nunca ficaria satisfeito.”
― Graciliano Ramos, Vidas Secas

“Tinha o coração grosso, queria responsabilizar alguém pela sua desgraça.”
― Graciliano Ramos, Vidas Secas

“I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.”
― Wislawa Szymborska, Nonrequired Reading

“- Falhamos a vida, menino!
- Creio que sim... Mas todo o mundo mais ou menos a falha. Isto é, falha-se sempre na realidade aquela vida que se planeou com a imaginação. Diz-se: «vou ser assim, porque a beleza está em ser assim». E nunca se é assim, é-se invariavelmente assado, como dizia o pobre marquês. Ás vezes melhor, mas sempre diferente.”
― José Maria Eça de Queirós, Os Maias

“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”
― Frantz Fanon

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Reader's Bill of Rights

1. The right to not read

2. The right to skip pages

3. The right to not finish

4. The right to reread

5. The right to read anything

6. The right to escapism

7. The right to read anywhere

8. The right to browse

9. The right to read out loud

10. The right to not defend your tastes”
― Daniel Pennac

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters