Ilona Terkessidis > Ilona's Quotes

“Het is zo moeilijk om pijn te vergeten, maar het is nog moeilijker om je te herinneren dat je gelukkig bent geweest. We houden geen littekens over van geluk. We leren zo weinig over vrede.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Just for the record, the weather today is calm and sunny, but the air is full of bullshit.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they're ready to leave”
― James Salter, Dusk and Other Stories

“I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.”
― James Salter, Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps

“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”
― Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

“Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“I am not the we of anyone”
― J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man

“Every love story is a potential grief story.”
― Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.”
― Groucho Marx

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street”
― W.H. Auden

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.”
― W. H. Auden, Collected Poems

“The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.”
― W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957

“El amor es un castigo. Somos castigados por no haber podido quedarnos solos. ”
― Marguerite Yourcenar

“The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.”
― J.M. Coetzee

“Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Passion such as hers is all consent, asking little in return. I had merely to enter a room where she was to see her face take on that peaceful expression of one who is resting in bed. If I touched her, I had the impression that all the blood in her veins was turning to honey.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar

“If I do start life all over again, I’ll do so very cautiously, but will I even start? Caution, understanding, it’s all useless. There is weariness, and nothing more.”
― Emmanuel Bove

“Hij vond de wereld slecht. Niemand was in staat tot onbaatzuchtigheid. Om zich heen zag hij alleen mensen die deden of ze het eeuwige leven hadden, ze waren onrechtvaardig en schraapzuchtig, slijmden tegen degenen aan wie ze iets konden hebben en lieten de rest links liggen. Hij vroeg zich af of het leven op die manier echt de moeite waard was om geleefd te worden, of het geluk niet eerder besloten lag in de eenzaamheid dan in de ellendige inspanningen die hij zich moest getroosten om de schijn op te houden tegenover zijn omgeving.”
― Emmanuel Bove, Het voorgevoel

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.”
― Stefan Zweig, Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Fowler Snared