Riester (Mei) > Riester's Quotes

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Chu Wanning held him, caressing his hair as if still in a dream, and sighed softly once more. "Did you know the most wonderful dreams are rarely ever true?"

Then he pulled away, the hug swiftly finished, like the light touch of a dragonfly on water.”
― Meatbun Doesn't Eat Meat, The Husky and His White Cat Shizun: Erha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun (Novel) Vol. 1

“Books never tire of me. And in time they present a solution, quietly waiting until I am fully healed.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“I'm not referring to books or novels about love, specifically, but rather to passages of writing that have the power to make you feel a little more alive. The paragraph that gives you a tingle of recognition. The lines that feel as if they are directly written for a deep, secret part of you, that you weren't necessarily even aware of until it was woken up by words.

Reading such a passage is, I think, a form of love. Like any relationship, that intrinsic recognition is a way of understanding and being understood, of seeing and being seen.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“After all, the people we love are a constellation. In loving them, it is our privilege to see and bring out all the different worlds and colours and depths within them, just as they have the potential to do the same for us in return.”
― Natasha Lunn

“Until you stop skim-reading your friend or lover or family member, and instead read them more closely, as a never-ending story. A story whose plot you cannot control, or rewrite, or ever fully finish.”
― Natasha Lunn, Conversations on Love

“Give your friendships the magic you would give a romance. Because they're just as important. Actually, for us, they're way more important.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as a life.”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“As soon as you begin to think, you can no longer love life”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“You will forget. Life is like that. Everything goes in time. Memories blur, pain diminishes. I remember my wife as one remembers a bird or a flower”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“And death hasn’t come. It never does come when you call it. It enjoys torturing us. I’ve been calling for it for years and it pays me no attention”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“– Where are they now?
– The dead are nowhere and everywhere”
― Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , La vieillesse

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. ”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“It wasn't that he didn't care for those around him, only that he did it quietly. Such solitude, day after day, without anyone to see or notice, was also a kind of torment.”
― Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou, The Husky and His White Cat Shizun: Erha He Ta De Bai Mao Shizun (Novel) Vol. 2

“- Is it their fault if they think that it’s good to work?

- No, said Colin, it’s not their fault. It’s because they’ve been told : work is sacred, it’s good, it’s nice, it’s what counts before anything, and only those who work have the right to everything. The only thing is, it’s been set up so that they work all the time so they can’t take advantage of it.

- But then they’re stupid, said Chloe.

- Yes, they’re stupid, said Colin. That’s why they agree with those that made them believe that work is the best thing there is. That saves them from thinking and finding a way to progress and to no longer work.”
― Boris Vian, L'écume des jours

“I'm full of despair and yet, at the same time, I'm horribly happy. It's a nice kind of feeling to want something as badly as that.”
― Boris Vian, L'écume des jours

“Je suis vide. Je n'ai que gestes, réflexes, habitudes. Je veux me remplir. C'est pourquoi je psychanalyse les gens...Je n'assimile pas. Je leur prends leurs pensées, leurs complexes, leurs hésitations et rien ne m'en reste. Je n'assimile pas; ou j'assimile trop bien..., c'est la même chose. Bien sure, je conserve des mots, des contenants, des étiquettes; je connais les termes sous lesquels on range les passions, les émotions, mais je ne les éprouve pas.”
― Boris Vian, L'arrache-coeur

“Peut-être sa plus grande fierté, ou même, la justification de son existence: que j'appartienne au monde qui l'avaint dédaigné.”
― Annie Ernaux, La place

“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice