Dimitra Nikoloù > Dimitra Nikoloù's Quotes

“Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.”
― W.E.B. DuBois

“It is remarkable that the persons we love most are those we can least describe.”
― Max Frisch

“Sabeth listened when I told her about my experiences, but as one listens to an old man; without interrupting, politely, without believing, without getting excited.”
― Max Frisch

“A person who does not concern himself with politics has already made the political choice he was so anxious to spare himself: he is serving the ruling party.”
― Max Frisch, Tagebuch 1946–1949

“Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are...”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“It's precisely the disappointing stories, which have no proper ending and therefore no proper meaning, that sound true to life.”
― Max Frisch

“What a pessimist you are!" exclaimed Candide.
"That is because I know what life is," said Martin.”
― Voltaire, Candide

“The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can't be learned at school.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I’m the kind of person who likes to be by himself. To put a finer point on it, I’m the type of person who doesn’t find it painful to be alone. I find spending an hour or two every day running alone, not speaking to anyone, as well as four or five hours alone at my desk, to be neither difficult nor boring. I’ve had this tendency ever since I was young, when, given a choice, I much preferred reading books on my own or concentrating on listening to music over being with someone else. I could always think of things to do by myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don't get that sort of system set by a certain age, you'll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“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

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
― Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela

“If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic,what else?”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“You’re chicken, she told herself, snapping her seat belt. This is America, you live in it, you let it happen. Let it unfurl.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

“Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.”
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

“On the day I lost my passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil.”
― Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

“All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed their luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundreds other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to die tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth saving. The personages in these pages are not men. Their humanity is buried, or they themselves have buried it, under an offense received or inflicted on someone else. The evil and insane SS men, the Kapos, the politicals, the criminals, the prominents, great and small, down to the indifferent slave Häftlinge, all the grades of the mad hierarchy created by the Germans paradoxically fraternized in a uniform internal desolation. But Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye