Isidora Rapajic > Isidora's Quotes

“Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble — Ira's marble — won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it. So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it.”
― J.D. Salinger

“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“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

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it will begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that won’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“La tía Daniela se enamoró como se enamoran siempre las mujeres inteligentes: como una idiota.”
― Angeles Mastretta, Mujeres de ojos grandes

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams.”
― H.G. Wells

“Miracles are never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realist to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit that fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Čudni su četinari. Bog šalje kišu, a njihovo se lišće ne ukvasi. Bog šalje sunce, a oni se ne raduju. Bog šalje vetar, a oni se ne ljuljaju. Bog šalje san i smrt drveću, a oni se zelene. Ali, kad uđeš u šumu, ti osetiš da se tlo pod tvojim korakom ugiba, i noga ti upada u nešto mekano i trulo. To su mirijade iglica koje su, kao suze ponosita čoveka, nečujno i nevidljivo pale. I vidiš sitne tačkice stvrdnute smole koja je prekonoć, u času crnog mraka kad ni najbliži sused ne može da vidi, potekla iz srca koje se u bolu steglo.”
― Isidora Sekulić, Pisma iz Norveške

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“...time was not passing...it was turning in a circle...”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. ”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“But nothing is lasting in this world. Even joy begins to fade after only one minute. Two minutes later, and it is weaker still, until finally it is swallowed up in our everyday, prosaic state of mind, just as a ripple made by a pebble gradually merges with the smooth surface of the water.”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

“And Petersburg was left without Akakii Akakievich, as though he had never lived there. A being disappeared, and was hidden, who was protected by none, dear to none, interesting to none, who never even attracted to himself the attention of an observer of nature, who omits no opportunity of thrusting a pin through a common fly, and examining it under the microscope...”
― Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat and Other Short Stories

“This Nevsky Prospect lies always, but more than ever, when the thick mass of night settles over it and makes the white and yellowish walls of houses stand out, when the whole town becomes thunderous and dazzling, a myriad carriages roll down the streets, postillions shout and mount their horses, and the devil himself lights the lamps in order to show everything in an unreal light”
― Nikolai Gogol, Nevsky Prospect

“I wish I’d done everything on Earth with you.”
― Baz Luhrmann

“Ti si moj trenutak i moj san
i sjajna moja reč u šumu
i samo si lepota koliko si tajna
i samo istina koliko si žudnja.

Ostaj nedostižna, nema i daleka
jer je san o sreći više nego sreća.
Budi bespovratna, kao mladost.
Neka tvoja sen i eho budu sve što seća.

Srce ima povest u suzi što leva,
u velikom bolu ljubav svoju metu.
Istina je samo što duša prosneva.
Poljubac je susret najlepši na svetu.

Od mog priviđ0enja ti si cela tkana,
tvoj plast sunčani od mog sna ispreden.
Ti beše misao moja očarana,
simbol svih taština, porazan i leden.

A ti ne postojiš, nit' si postojala.
Rođena u mojoj tišini i čami,
na Suncu mog srca ti si samo sjala
jer sve što ljubimo - stvorili smo sami.”
― Jovan Dučić