Marika > Marika's Quotes

“Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old.”
― Epicurus

“An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
― Henry Miller

“Neither can embellishments of language be found without arrangement and expression of thoughts, nor can thoughts be made to shine without the light of language. ”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Books that teach us to dance: There are writers who, by portraying the impossible as possible, and by speaking of morality and genius as if both were high-spirited freedom, as if man were rising up on tiptoe and simply had to dance out of inner pleasure. ”
― Nietzsche, Friedrich

“Now, please don't tell me you don't care about how you look and that there's more to you than your appearance. There are two kinds of people in this world : people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“To write is to know that you are not at home.”
― Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

“In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.”
― Colette

“But what is the heart, madame? It's worth less than people think. it's quite accommodating, it accepts anything. You give it whatever you have, it's not very particular. But the body... Ha! That's something else again! It has a cultivated taste, as they say, it knows what it wants. A heart doesn't choose, and one always ends up by loving.”
― Colette, The Pure and the Impure

“Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society. Itʼs how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we donʼt need. Think about it. Fear that weʼre going to be attacked, fear that there are communists lurking around every corner, fear that some little Caribbean country that doesnʼt believe in our way of life poses a threat to us. Fear that black culture may take over the world. Fear of Elvis Presleyʼs hips. Well, maybe that one is a real fear. Fear that our bad breath might ruin our friendships… Fear of growing old and being alone.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.”
― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

“I was dancing with an immortal august woman, who had black lilies in her hair, and her dreamy gesture seemed laden with a wisdom more profound than the darkness that is between star and star, and with a love like the love that breathed upon the waters; and as we danced on and on, the incense drifted over us and round us, covering us away as in the heart of the world, and ages seemed to pass, and tempests to awake and perish in the folds of our robes and in her heavy hair.

Suddenly I remembered that her eyelids had never quivered, and that her lilies had not dropped a black petal, or shaken from their places, and understood with a great horror that I danced with one who was more or less than human, and who was drinking up my soul as an ox drinks up a wayside pool; and I fell, and darkness passed over me.”
― W.B. Yeats, Rosa Alchemica

“Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again , come , come.”
― Jelaluddin Rumi

“A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Now, lucky you can say, ‘Not standing up to him is giving him permission,’ but if you’ve been fed this diet since the year dot, there is no standing up. Victims aren’t cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be just to carry on.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Okay, she's mad as a sack of ferrets.”
― David Mitchell

“...the thought of covering her in anything is Byronically diverting.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“My right foot hits the ground first, but my left one's gone AWOL, and I'm cartwheeling, my body mapped by local explosions of pain -- ankle, knee, elbow -- shit, my left ski's gone, whipped off, vamoosed -- ground-woods-sky, ground-woods-sky ground-woods-sky, a faceful of gravelly snow; dice in a tumbler; apples in a tumble dryer, a grunt, a groan, a plea, a shiiiiiiiiit ...
[ ... ]
Gravity, velocity, and the ground; stopping is going to cost a fortune and the only acceptable currency is pain.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“the Rottnest Light is a stumpy middle finger sticking up from the a rocky rise, grunting, "Sit on this, mate.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it's the edges of the maps that fascinate...”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to "I hate to read new books," and I hollered "Comrade!" to whoever owned it before me.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road