Ena Alvarado > Ena's Quotes

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

“Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—
And hoping
It will reach Japan.”
― Alice Munro

“Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“But in the end, time is a noose around the neck, strangling slowly.”
― Rohinton Mistry

“He llegado a esa dura etapa de la vida, que es el repliegue.”
― Arturo Uslar Pietri

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

--From the poem "Lady Lazarus", written 23-29 October 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I woke to the sound of rain.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
― Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings

“This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.”
― Charles Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party