Maira M. Moura > Maira's Quotes

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“Do you drink?"
"Of course,I just said I was a writer.”
― Stephen King

“I don't have a drinking problem 'Cept when I can't get a drink.”
― Tom Waits

“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“When will you learn that there isn't a word for everything?”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.”
― Orson Welles

“Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“Marques de Sade, o mais livre dos espíritos que já viveu até hoje, tinha conceitos próprios em relação a mulher: ele queria que ela fosse tão livre quanto o homem. Dessas ideias - que tomarão forma algum dia - nasceu duas novelas Justine e Juliette. Não foi mero acidente Sade ter escolhido heroínas ao invés de heróis. Justine é a mulher como ela tem sido até hoje, escravizada, miserável e menos que humana; seu oposto, Juliette, representa a mulher cujo advento ele antecipou, uma figura da qual as mentes ainda não tinham uma concepção, que está ascendendo na humanidade, que deverá ganhar asas, e que deverá renovar o mundo.”
― Guillaume Apollinaire

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Every day one should at least hear one little song, read one good poem, see one fine painting and -- if at all possible -- speak a few sensible words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”
― Robert Graves

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there”
― George Harrison

“The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”
― Simon De Beavoir

“All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge”
― Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts”
― Jose Saramago

“Reading is probably another way of being in a place.”
― José Saramago, El hombre duplicado

“Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.”
― José Saramago

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I think what I want is for someone to know me. Really know me. Know me better than anyone else and maybe even me. Isn’t that why we commit to another? It’s not for sex. If it were for sex, we wouldn’t marry one person. We’d just keep finding new partners. We commit for many reasons, I know, but the more I think about it, the more I think long-term relationships are for getting to know someone. I want someone to know me, really know me, almost like that person could get into my head. What would that feel like? To have access, to know what it’s like in someone else’s head. To rely on someone else, have him rely on you. That’s not a biological connection like the one between parents and children. This kind of relationship would be chosen. It would be something cooler, harder to achieve than one built on biology and shared genetics. I think that’s it. Maybe that’s how we know when a relationship is real. When someone else previously unconnected to us knows us in a way we never thought or believed possible.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought.”
― Iain Reid, I'm Thinking of Ending Things

“To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare.”
― Yoshida Kenko, Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō