vic > vic's Quotes

“We have not touched the stars,
nor are we forgiven, which brings us back
to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,
not from the absence of violence, but despite
the abundance of it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
                    but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
                                                                        but then he’s still left with his hands.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“with this bullet lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because
it’s all I have,
because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this
bullet inside me
‘cause I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“History repeats itself. Someone says this.
History throws its shadow over beginning, over the desktop, over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
history is the little man in a brown suit trying to define a room he is outside of,
I know history. There are many names in history... but none of them are ours.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

“Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“If only one’s eyes weren’t visible to others, she thinks. If only one could hide one’s eyes from the world.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“After all, is not a real Hell better than a manufactured Heaven?”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Because I say so little you think I don't feel. I care a lot.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“He educated Maurice, or rather his spirit educated Maurice's spirit, for they themselves became equal. Neither thought "Am I led; am I leading?" Love had caught him out of triviality and Maurice out of bewilderment in order that two imperfect souls might touch perfection.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“But it was the stupidity of passion, which would rather have nothing than a little.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“A slow nature such as Maurice's appears insensitive, for it needs time even to feel.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“He lived on, miserable and misunderstood, as before, and increasingly lonely. One cannot write those words too often: Maurice’s loneliness: it increased.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“Yet he was doing a fine thing — proving on how little a soul can exist. Fed neither by Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward, a lamp that would have blown out, were materialism true. He hadn't a God, he hadn't a lover — the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and suppress any legends about Heaven.”
― E.M. Forster, Maurice

“O for the night that was ending, for the sleep and the wakefulness, the toughness and tenderness mixed, the sweet temper, the safety in darkness. Would such a night ever return?”
― E M Forster, Maurice

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Le anime hanno un loro particolar modo d'intendersi, d'entrare in intimità, fino a darsi del tu, mentre le nostre persone sono tuttavia impacciate nel commercio delle parole comuni, nella schiavitù delle esigenze sociali. Han bisogni lor proprii e le loro proprie aspirazioni le anime, di cui il corpo non si dà per inteso, quando veda l'impossibilità di soddisfarli e di tradurle in atto. E ogni qualvolta due che comunichino fra loro così, con le anime soltanto, si trovano soli in qualche luogo, provano un turbamento angoscioso e quasi una repulsione violenta d'ogni minimo contatto materiale, una sofferenza che li allontana, e che cessa subito, non appena un terzo intervenga. Allora, passata l'angoscia, le due anime sollevate si ricercano e tornano a sorridersi da lontano.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal

“Lessi così di tutto un po', disordinatamente; ma libri, in ispecie, di filosofia. Pesano tanto:
eppure, chi se ne ciba e se li mette in corpo, vive tra le nuvole.”
― Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal

“Ebbene signor Meis, il destino di Roma è l’identico. I papi ne avevano fatto – a modo loro, s’intende – un’acquasantiera; noi italiani ne abbiamo fatto, a modo nostro, un portacenere.”
― Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal

“Potei sperimentare che l’uomo, quando soffre, si fa una particolare idea del bene e del male, e cioè del bene che gli altri dovrebbero fargli e a cui egli pretende, come se dalle proprie sofferenze gli derivasse un diritto al compenso; e del male che egli può fare a gli altri, come se parimenti dalle proprie sofferenze vi fosse abilitato. E se gli altri non gli fanno il bene quasi per dovere, egli li accusa e di tutto il male ch’egli fa quasi per diritto, facilmente si scusa.”
― Luigi Pirandello, Il fu Mattia Pascal

“Your hair is winter fire
January embers
My heart burns there, too.”
― Stephen King, It

“I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

“My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal