Morisia > Morisia's Quotes

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“What would life be like if it were not futile? Futility is the foundation upon which it rests. On what other foundation could it have been based which would have held and never given way? A great idea can be undermined by another great idea and, in due course, be demolished by it. But futility is inaccessible, indestructible, immovable. It is a true foundation and that is why it has been chosen as such.”
― Pär Lagerkvist, The Dwarf

“His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“Immersed in solitude, he would dream or read far into the night. By protracted contemplation of the same thoughts, his mind grew sharp, his vague, undeveloped ideas took on form.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
― Samuel Beckett

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
― Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”
― Samuel Beckett, Krapp's Last Tape & Embers

“Normally I didn’t see a great deal. I didn’t hear a great deal either. I didn’t pay attention. Strictly speaking I wasn’t there. Strictly speaking I believe I’ve never been anywhere.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear”
― Samuel Beckett

“Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.”
― Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French

“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically--to those who hardly think about us in return.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.”
― T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“The deeds of men, as footprints in the desert.
Nothing under the circling moons is fated to last.
Even the sun goes down.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

“There are kinds of action, for good or ill, that lie so far outside the boundaries of normal behavior that they force us, in acknowledging that they have occurred, to restructure our own understanding of reality. We have to make room for them.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree

“We must be what we are, or we become our enemies. ”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, A Song for Arbonne

“By things so achingly small are lives measured and marred.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“When I'm all grown up, come what may,
I'll build a boat to carry me away”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.

You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“Only then, invisible to everyone and with her curtains drawn, did she allow her tears to fall: in love, and for his hurts, and in terrible pride.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“He wanted to achieve something of surpassing beauty that would last. A creation that would mean that he--the mosaic worker Caius Crispus of Varena--had been born, and lived a life, and had come to understand a portion of the nature of the world, of what ran through and beneath the deeds of women and men in their souls and in the beauty and the pain of their short living beneath the sun.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium

“... everyone knew that all islands were worlds unto themselves, that to come to an island was to come to another world.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“Truth" when examining events and records of the past was always precarious, uncertain. No man could say for certain how the river of time would have flowed, cresting or receding, bringing floods or gently watering fields, had a single event, or even many, unfolded differently.

It is in the nature of existence under heaven, the dissenting scholars wrote, that we cannot know these things with clarity. We cannot live twice, or watch as moments of the past unfurl, like a courtesan's silk fan. The river flows, the dancers finish their dance. If the music starts again it is starting anew, not repeating itself.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven

“I know love,"
Says the littlest one.
"Love is like a flower."

"Why is love a flower?
Little one tell me."

"Love is a flower
For the sweetness it gives
Before it dies away.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Lions of Al-Rassan

“This was not a beauty that warmed one. It cut, like a weapon. There was no nuance of gentleness in her, no shading of care, but fair she was, as is the flight of an arrow before it kills.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, The Fionavar Tapestry

“The soul must bend to endure.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors