Rania Ioannou > Rania's Quotes

“New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.”
― Anne Rice, Lasher

“You don't choose your friends, they choose you, and you either reject them or you accept them without reservations.”
― Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel

“That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. ”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in.”
― Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

“Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home--they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things you must risk it.
And here is the shock- when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of common sense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights; then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.
You are unhappy. Things get worse.
It is a time of mourning. Loss. Fear. We battle ourselves through with questions. And then we feel shot and wounded.
And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See I told you so.' In fact, they have told you nothing.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won't help you.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“Άλλος πέφτει στο ποτάμι με τους κροκόδειλους, άλλος στο ηφαίστειο* τι είναι άραγε καλύτερο, να καείς στη φλόγα ή να σβήσεις στην άμμο;”
― Σώτη Τριανταφύλλου, Για την αγάπη της γεωμετρίας

“Ο κόσμος είναι χορευτής, χείμαρρος, καράβι, ομίχλη, ιστός αράχνης* είναι αυτό που θέλεις, αυτό που είσαι* ο παράδεισος και η γη: γαϊτανάκι και πανηγύρι, μυρμηγκοφωλιά και παλιό παλτό...”
― Σώτη Τριανταφύλλου, Για την αγάπη της γεωμετρίας

“Τον έρωτα όχι, όχι εσύ, Ανάγκη, τον έρωτα τον έπλασε ο Θάνατος, από άγρια περιέργεια να εννοήσει τι είναι ζωή.”
― Κική Δημουλά

“Δίκιο έχουν οι σκεπτικιστές όταν υποστηρίζουν ότι η ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας είναι μια ατέρμονη διαδοχή χαμένων ευκαιριών.”
― José Saramago, A Viagem do Elefante

“It's always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake.”
― Anne Rice, Lasher

“The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against 'God' - De Sade, Byron's "Manfred", Schiller's "Robbers", Goethe's "Faust", Hoffmann's mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the 'spirits' decided to make a planned and consistent effort at 'communication'? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.”
― Colin Wilson, The Occult

“Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on.”
― George Gordon Byron

“To be left with only the trace of a memory is to gaze at an armchair that's still molded to the form of a love who has left never to return: It is to grieve, dear reader, it is to weep.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book

“...a nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book

“They, like me, like all of us, had, once upon a time, in a past so far away it seemed like heaven, caught by chance a glimpse of an inner essence, only to forget what it was. It was this lost memory that pained us, reduced us to ruins, though still we struggled to be ourselves.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book

“...at the end of the day there was nothing to be gained by reminding people that everything that had ever been written, even the greatest and most authoritative texts in the world, were about dreams, not real life, dreams conjured up by words.”
― Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“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

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