Zach C > Zach's Quotes

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 6

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.”
― Marcel Proust

“Phall if you but will, rise you must.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― T.S. Eliot

“If you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it!”
― Nick Cave

“If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”
― T.S. Eliot

“Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“To raise the veil.
To see what you're saying goodbye to.”
― Louise Gluck

“Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It's all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, first creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.”
― Nick Cave

“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“There is no day that one should skip
But one should seize, without distrust,
The possible with iron grip”
― Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust

“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“Love loves to love love.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, silently, successively, enumerate?”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
― Proust-M

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table