+ > +'s Quotes

“We really wanted to know all the unknowable things about each other and how we were the same and how we were different, if we even were, maybe nobody is.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“I went to work the next day out of curiosity, as people return to their villages after the war to see what is left.”
― Miranda July, No One Belongs Here More Than You

“That is my problem with life, I rush through it, like I'm being chased. Even things whose whole point is slowness, like drinking relaxing tea. When I drink relaxing tea I suck it down as if I'm in a contest for who can drink relaxing tea the quickest.”
― Miranda July

“Everything was so quiet, as if the silence was listening.”
― Anna Kavan

“When he asked my grandmother if she would mind being poor, she said she would be happy just to have her daughter and himself: 'If you have love, even plain water is sweet.”
― Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

“Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“The world would only cease to terrify me if I became the world. If I were the world, I wouldn't be afraid. If we are the world, we are moved by a delicate radar that guides.”
― Clarice Lispector

“I don’t understand. She’s always been so friendly toward me.”

“Yes, so long as your work consisted of updating calendars and photocopying golf club bylaws.”

“But there was no danger of my taking her place!”

“She was never afraid of that.”

“Then why denounce me? Why would it upset her if I went to work for you?”

“Miss Mori struggled for years to get the job she has now. She probably found it unbearable for you to get that sort of promotion after being with the company only ten weeks.”

“I can’t believe it. That’s just so … mean.”

“All I can say is that she suffered greatly during the first few years she was here.”

“So she wants me to suffer the same fate? It’s too pathetic. I must talk to her.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?”

“Of course. How else are we going to work things out if we don’t talk?”

“You just talked to Mister Omochi. Does it strike you that things have been worked out?”
― Amélie Nothomb, Stupeur et tremblements

“The accountants who spent ten hours a day copying out numbers were, to my mind, victims sacrificed on the altar of a divinity wholly bereft of either greatness or mystery. These humble creatures were devoting their entire lives to a reality beyond their grasp. In days gone by they might have at least believed there was some purpose to their servitude. Now they no longer had any illusions. They were giving up their lives for nothing, and they knew it.

Everyone knows that Japan has the highest suicide rate of any country in the world. What surprised me was that suicides were not more common.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Stupeur et tremblements

“What is a flower? A giant sexual organ in its Sunday best. The truth has been known for a long time, yet, over-aged adolescents that we are, we persist in speaking sentimental drives about the delicacy of flowers. We construct idiotic phrases like "So-and-so is in the flower of his youth", which is as absurd as saying "in the vagina of his youth".”
― Amélie Nothomb, Le Sabotage amoureux

“La única manera de dejar de sufrir consiste en mantener la cabeza vacía”
― Amélie Nothomb

“Uno se cruza a veces con gente que, en voz alta y fuerte, presume de haberse privado de tal o cual delicia durante veinticinco años. También conocemos a fantásticos idiotas que se alaban por el hecho de no haber escuchado jamás música, por no haber abierto nunca un libro o no haber ido nunca al cine. También están los que esperan suscitar admiración a causa de su absoluta castidad. Alguna vanidad tienen que sacar de todo eso: es la única alegría que tendrán en la vida.”
― Amélie Nothomb, Métaphysique des tubes

“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

“I’m aware that there is a bigger, far more complicated world out there than I’d ever realized, and just like the students at Beijing University, I’ve glimpsed it only fleetingly, peripherally. I’ve sensed the vast expanse of my own ignorance now. I feel antsy and constricted and a deep, almost sexual yearning for velocity, for some sort of raw, transcendent experience that I cannot even begin to articulate.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

“Everything became a metaphor, a talisman, a sign that I was still actually connected to people—that I wasn’t so completely on my own.”
― Susan Jane Gilman, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven

“I suffered unbearable torture in silence, weeping internallyat the sad turn of events, blaming myself bitterly again and again for having delved into the supernatural without first acquiring a fuller knowledge of the subject and providing against the dangers and risks of the path.”
― Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man

“Little did I realize that from that day onwards I was never to be my old normal self again, that I had unwittingly and without preparation or even adequate knowledge of it roused to activity the most wonderful and stern power in man, that I had stepped unknowingly upon the key to the most guarded secret of the ancients, and that thenceforth for a long time I had to live suspended by a thread, swinging between life on the one hand and death on the other, between sanity and insanity, between light and darkness, between heaven and earth.”
― Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man

“At such times I felt instinctively that a life and death struggle was going on inside me in which I, the owner of the body, was entirely powerless to take part, forced to lie quietly and watch as a spectator the weird drama unfolded in my own flesh.”
― Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man

“The only way you can conquer me is through love and there I am gladly conquered”
― Krishna

“The postures are only the "skin" of yoga. Hidden behind them are the "flesh and blood" of breath control and mental techniques that are still more difficult to learn, as well as moral practices that require a lifetime of consistent application and that correspond to the skeletal structure of the body. The higher practices of concentration, meditation and unitive ecstasy(samadhi) are analogous to the circulatory and nervous system." Georg Feuerstein The Deeper Dimension of Yoga”
― Georg Feuerstein, The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice

“Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth”
― Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found.”
― Pema Chodron

“Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.”
― Pema Chodron

“It is one of the strictest conditions of initiation that occult knowledge may never be sold or used for gain.”
― Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense

“...a trained occultist, especially if of high grade, has an exceedingly magnetic personality, and this is apt to prove disturbing to those who are unaccustomed to high- tension psychic forces. For whereas the person who is ripe for development will unfold the higher consciousness rapidly in the atmosphere of a high-grade initiate, the person who is not ready may find these influences profoundly disturbing.”
― Dion Fortune, Psychic Self-Defense

“We take spiritual initiation when we become conscious of the Divine within us, and thereby contact the Divine without us.”
― Dion Fortune, Esoteric Orders and Their Work and The Training and Work of the Initiate

“Day and night I always dream with open eyes.”
― Jose Marti

“The mind I love must have wild places.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
― Edith Wharton