Isabel > Isabel's Quotes

“Não procures a noite por não suportares o dia.”
― Vergílio Ferreira, Aparição

“Hasta que se llora de veras no se sabe si se tiene o no alma.”
― Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla

“Algunas cosas no cambian. Hay cosas encerradas detrás de los muros que no pueden cambiar porque nadie las oye.”
― Federico García Lorca, Yerma

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“You wouldn't abandon ship in a storm just because you couldn't control the winds.”
― Thomas More, Utopia

“«Que diferença de Lisboa. Não se pode viver numa cidade sem passado.»”
― António Lobo Antunes, D'este viver aqui neste papel descripto

“Coitados, pensavam que eu gostaria de ler histórias de pessoas sem contrastes, em que os bons são sempre bons e os maus sempre maus, e a bondade e a maldade se acham divididas por uma muralha da China bem definida, e ainda bem, para sabermos de que lado convém estar.”
― António Lobo Antunes, D'este viver aqui neste papel descripto

“You transfix me quite.”
― Charlotte Brönte

“These are the times that try men's souls.”
― Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

“It is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble your foe.”
― Anne Brontë

“Viver é como escrever sem corrigir.”
― António Lobo Antunes

“I've got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?”
― Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“I think; therefore I am.”
― Rene Descartes

“What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.”
― A.P. Chekhov

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be. Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn't be crossed.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.”
― Marvin Bell

“I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one.”
― Ingmar Bergman

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost