Laura Machado > Laura's Quotes

“I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, 'I exist.' In thousands of agonies -- I exist. I'm tormented on the rack -- but I exist! Though I sit alone in a pillar -- I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn't thought about it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“It suddenly occurred to me that you don't need order to live. There is no pattern to follow and the pattern itself doesn't even exist: I am born.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.”
― Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

“Nada existe de mais difícil do que entregar-se ao instante. Esta dificuldade é dor humana.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Oh, living is so uncomfortable. Everything presses in: the body demands, the spirit never ceases, living is like being weary but being unable to sleep–living is upsetting. You can’t walk around naked, either in body or in spirit.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The alternation of day and night is merely a physical phenomenon, time is a question of being human and, frankly, how could I consider myself a human being, I who have only known thirty-nine people and all of them women? I think that time must have something to do with the duration of pregnancies, the growth of children, all those things that I haven’t experienced. If someone spoke to me, there would be time, the beginning and end of what they said to me, the moment when I answered, their response. The briefest conversation creates time. Perhaps I have tried to create time through writing these pages. I begin, I fill them with words, I pile them up, and I still don’t exist because nobody is reading them. I am writing them for some unknown reader who will probably never come—I am not even sure that humanity has survived that mysterious event that governed my life. But if that person comes, they will read them and I will have a time in their mind. They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. I will only be truly dead if nobody ever comes, if the centuries, then the millennia go by for so long that this planet, which I no longer believe is Earth, no longer exists. As long as the sheets of paper covered in my handwriting lie on this table, I can become a reality in someone’s mind. Then everything will be obliterated, the suns will burn out and I will disappear like the universe.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“Seek knowledge for its own sake. Not all knowledge needs to be useful. Sometimes it should be pursued for pure pleasure. Leonardo did not need to know how heart valves work to paint the Mona Lisa, nor did he need to figure out how fossils got to the top of mountains to produce Virgin of the Rocks. By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci