Paloma > Paloma's Quotes

“El día que te fuiste entendí que no te volvería a ver. Ibas teñida de rojo por el sol de la tarde, por el crepúsculo ensangrentado del cielo; Sonreías. Dejabas atrás un pueblo del que muchas veces me dijiste: ‘Lo quiero por ti; pero lo odio por todo lo demás, hasta por haber nacido en él’. Pensé: ‘No regresará jamás; no volverá nunca.”
― Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell

“If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“If I could live again my life,
In the next – I’ll try,
- to make more mistakes,
I won’t try to be so perfect,
I’ll be more relaxed,
I’ll be more full – than I am now,
In fact, I’ll take fewer things seriously,
I’ll be less hygienic,
I’ll take more risks,
I’ll take more trips,
I’ll watch more sunsets,
I’ll climb more mountains,
I’ll swim more rivers,
I’ll go to more places – I’ve never been,
I’ll eat more ice creams and less lima beans,
I’ll have more real problems – and less imaginary ones,
I was one of those people who live
prudent and prolific lives -
each minute of his life,
Of course that I had moments of joy – but,
if I could go back I’ll try to have only good moments,

If you don’t know – that’s what life is made of,
Don’t lose the now!

I was one of those who never goes anywhere
without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle,
and without an umbrella and without a parachute,

If I could live again – I will travel light,
If I could live again – I’ll try to work bare feet
at the beginning of spring till the end of autumn,
I’ll ride more carts,
I’ll watch more sunrises and play with more children,
If I have the life to live – but now I am 85,
- and I know that I am dying …”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we'd been born.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Love must not entreat,' she added, 'or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“One never reaches home,' she said. 'But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.”
― Hermann Hesse , Demian

“I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian

“life isn’t a joke because in the middle of the day you die. A human being’s most pressing need was to become a human being.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“Milagros, no. Pero las coincidencias. Vivía de las coincidencias, vivía de líneas que incidían y se cruzaban y, en el cruce, formaban un leve e instantáneo punto, tan leve e instantáneo que era más bien un secreto. Apenas hablase de las coincidencias, no estaría hablando de nada.”
― Clarice Lispector, Aprendizaje o El libro de los placeres

“No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas

“A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

“No, no, she wasn’t lost, she was even going to make a list of things she could do!
She sat with a blank page and wrote: eat — look at fruit in the market — see people’s faces — feel love — feel hate — have something not known and feel an unbearable suffering — wait impatiently for the beloved — sea — go into the sea — buy a new swimsuit — make coffee — look at objects — listen to music — holding hands — irritation — be right — not be right and give in to someone who is — be forgiven for the vanity of living — be a woman — do myself credit — laugh at the absurdity of my condition — have no choice — have a choice — fall asleep — but of bodily love I shall not speak.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“Lóri was feeling as if she were a dangerous tiger with an arrow buried in its flesh, and which had been circling slowly around frightened people to see who would take away its pain. And then a man, Ulisses, had felt that a wounded tiger isn’t dangerous. And approaching the beast, unafraid to touch her, he had carefully pulled out the buried arrow.”
― Clarice Lispector , An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“And the tiger? No, neither people nor animals can say thank you for certain things. So she, the tiger, had paced languorously in front of the man, hesitated, licked one of her paws and then, since neither a word or a grunt was what mattered, gone off in silence. Lóri would never forget the help she’d received when she could only manage to stammer with fear.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“…she wanted [her pupils] to know, through their Portuguese class, that the taste of a fruit is in the contact of the fruit with the palate and not in the fruit itself.”
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

“Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Where does music go when it’s not playing?—she asked herself. And disarmed she would answer: May they make a harp out of my nerves when I die.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“What I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“Never suffer because you don't have an opinion on this or that topic. Never suffer because you are not something or because you are.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“I'm so frightened that I shall be able to accept the notion that I have lost myself only if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“An egg is a thing that must be careful. That's why the chicken is the egg's disguise. The chicken exists so that the egg can traverse the ages. That's what a mother is for.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Complete Stories

“Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“I don't want beauty, I want identity.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“A note exists between two notes of music, between two facts exists a fact, between two grains of sand no matter how close together there exists an interval of space, a sense that exists between senses — in the interstices of primordial matter is the line of mystery and fire that is the breathing of the world, and the continual breathing of the world is what we hear and call silence.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.