Vivien Ren > Vivien's Quotes

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play... I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. ”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”
― oscar wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One of the great secrets of life. Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense and discover too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I envied and feared my mother’s ability to keep matters private, as every secret I tried to hold close ate away at me. She possessed a rare talent for keeping secrets, even from us. She did not need anyone. She could surprise you with how little she needed you. All those years she instructed me to save 10 percent of myself like she did, I never knew it meant she had also been keeping a part of herself from me too.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I thought about the books that I had looked through in the bookstore. It occurred to me that they were full of things that people wanted to say to other people, or things people wanted somebody to say to them.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That's the fundamental nature of glass. And that's why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped, then they're good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn't be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Why are we walking in the dark, let's go over there, where the flowers are blooming.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death

“Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“İnsanlar birbirlerini tanımanın ne kadar güç olduğunu bildikleri için bu zahmetli işe teşebbüs etmektense, körler gibi rastgele dolaşmayı ve ancak çarpıştıkça birbirlerinin mevcudiyetinden haberdar olmayı tercih ediyor.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“Başkasına merhamet etmek, ondan daha kuvvetli olduğumuzu zannetmektir ki, ne kendimiz bu kadar büyük, ne de başkalarını bizden daha zavallı görmeye hakkımız yoktur.”
― Sabahattin Ali , Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“Zaten küçüklüğümden beri saadeti israf etmekten korkar, bir kısmını ilerisi için saklamak isterdim... Bu hal gerçi birçok fırsatları kaçırmama sebep olurdu, fakat fazlasını isteyerek talihimi korkutmaktan her zaman çekinirdim.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“The pain of losing something precious - be it happiness or material wealth – can be forgotten over time. But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nagging thought that things might have turned out differently. Because without that thought, we would put it down to fate and accept it.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“hayatımızın, birtakım ehemmiyetsiz teferruatın oyuncağı olduğunu, çünkü asıl hayatın teferruattan ibaret bulunduğunu görüyordum. bizim mantığımızla hayatın mantığı asla birbirine uymuyordu. bir kadın, trenin penceresinden dışarı bakabilir, bu sırada gözüne bir kömür parçası kaçar, o ehemmiyet vermeden bunu ovuşturur ve bu minimini hadise dünyanın en güzel gözlerinden birini kör edebilirdi. Yahut bir kiremit, hafif bir rüzgarla yerinden oynayarak, devrin gıpta ettiği bir kafayı parçalayabilirdi. göz mü mühim kömür parçası mı, kiremit mi mühim kafa mı diye düşünmek nasıl aklımıza gelmiyorsa ve bütün bunları nasıl hiç mütalaa yürütmeden kabule mecbursak, hayatın daha başka türlü birçok cilvelerine de aynı tevekkülle katlanmaya mecburduk.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna

“A friend sends me a line from my novel: 'Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.' How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief

“Grief never ends, but we find a way to walk in the light someone has left behind, rather than living in pain's shadow.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Small Worlds

“Maybe this is all we need sometimes, for someone else to believe in the possibilities you see for yourself.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Small Worlds

“Auntie understood that anger was a necessary emotion but often it was misdirected; and its misdirection was how the death we knew in multitudes multiplied further, and much of this misdirection emerged from not having space.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Small Worlds