Nevena Kotarac > Nevena's Quotes

“Kad budu svi roktali svojim svinjskim srcima, poslednji koji će još gledati ljudskim očima i osećati ljudskim srcem biće oni kojima ne bejaše strano iskustvo umetnosti.”
― Danilo Kiš

“Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.”
― Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984

“Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “cristallisation,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.”
― Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
― Virginia Woolf

“I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words. When I speak, I only pack myself a little differently.”
― Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.”
― Boris Pasternak

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“You are very attractive. And your greatest charm is that you do not realise it!”
― A.J. Cronin, The Citadel

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“Every man's memory is his private literature.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.”
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible

“We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.”
― John Champlin Gardner Jr., On Becoming a Novelist

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“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

“Neko bude ružino drvo
Neki budu vetrove kćeri
Neki ružokradice

Ružokradice se privuku ružinom drvetu
Jedan od njih ukrade ružu
U srce je svoje sakrije

Vetrove se kćeri pojave
Ugledaju obranu lepotu
I pojure ružokradice

Otvaraju im grudi jednom po jednom
U nekoga nadju srce
U nekoga bogami ne

Otvaraju im otvaraju grudi
Sve dok u jednog srce ne otkriju
I u srcu ukradenu ružu”
― Vasko Popa

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
― Toni Morrison

“I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“But luxury has never appealed to me, I like simple things, books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier

“pustite me da koracam prema sebi kao prema svome cilju.”
― Branko Miljkovic

“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“I'm always telling myself I don't have many feelings. Even when something does affect me I'm only moderately moved. I almost never cry. It's not that I'm stronger than the ones with teary eyes, I'm weaker. They have courage. When all you are is skin and bones, feelings are a brave thing. I'm more of a coward. The difference is minimal though, I just use my strength not to cry. When I do allow myself a feeling, I take the part that hurts and bandage it up with a story that doesn't cry, that doesn't dwell on homesickness.”
― Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel

“The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You're asked an unexpected question, you don't even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face twitches to give you away. But the truth, alas, has been disturbed by the question, and it rises up from the depths of your soul to flicker in your eyes and all is lost.”
― Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita