Diya > Diya's Quotes

“Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“There are plenty of images of women in science fiction. There are hardly any women.”
― Joanna Russ

“Everything is permitted, Nothing is true.”
― Oliver Bowden, Renaissance

“I have seen myself backward.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

“I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“Just because something seems impossible doesn’t make it untrue,”
― Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”
― Richard P. Feynman

“For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Hers was tougher than tough love. It was brutal, industrial-strength. A sinewy love that never gave way to an inch of weakness. It was a love that saw what was best for you ten steps ahead, and didn't care if it hurt like hell in the meantime. When I got hurt, she felt it so deeply, it was as though it were her own affliction. She was guilty only of caring too much. I realize this now, only in retrospect. No one in this would would ever love me as much as my mother, and she would never let me forget it.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“Maybe there’s something mistaken in this desire men have to instruct us; I was young at the time, and I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew how to be not only a man in the right way but also a woman. And today when he no longer senses me as part of himself, he feels betrayed. I”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Maybe, I thought, I’ve given too much weight to the cultivated use of reason, to good reading, to well controlled language, to political affiliation; maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I concluded that first of all I had to understand better what I was. Investigate my nature as a woman. I had been excessive, I had striven to give myself male capacities. I thought I had to know everything, be concerned with everything. What did I care about politics, about struggles. I wanted to make a good impression on men, be at their level. At the level of what, of their reason, most unreasonable.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be if he were a woman. For Franco, I said, I was an opportunity for him to expand into the feminine, to take possession of it: I constituted the proof of his omnipotence, the demonstration that he knew now to be not only a man in the right way, but also a woman.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me...I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

“You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.”
― Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay