Sabina > Sabina 's Quotes

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“If you don't like someone's story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe

“Life has now taught me that love for things, like all unrequited love, takes its toll in the long run.”
― Adolfo Bioy Casares, Asleep in the Sun

“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

“Writing. Love is writing.”
― Hilda Doolittle, HERmione

“It is moonlight. Alone in the silence
I ascend my stairs once more,
While waves remote in pale blue starlight
Crash on a white sand shore.
It is moonlight. The garden is silent.
I stand in my room alone.
Across my wall, from the far-off moon,
A rain of fire is thrown.
There are houses hanging above the stars,
And stars hung under the sea,
And a wind from the long blue vault of time
Waves my curtains for me.
I wait in the dark once more,
swung between space and space:
Before the mirror I lift my hands
And face my remembered face.”
― Conrad Aiken

“Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up. ”
― Pearl S. Buck

“Poetry is a sort of homecoming.”
― Paul Celan

“Wer nur die Hälfte liebt, der liebt dich nicht halb, sondern gar nicht. Der will dich zurechtschneiden, amputieren, verstümmeln.”
― Erich Fried, Gedichte.

“Do not doubt him who tells you he is afraid, but be afraid of him who tells you he has no doubts.

Zweifle nicht an dem der dir sagt er hat Angst, aber hab Angst vor dem der dir sagt, er kennt keinen Zweifel.”
― Erich Fried, 100 Poems Without a Country

“What you resist, persists”
― C.G. Jung

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
― Coco Chanel

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep."

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Reading dreams. That's what started her walking down the road. Every day she'd walk a little further: a mile, and come home. Two miles, and come home. One day she just kept on.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Mach dir keine Sorgen. Du hast zuviel und zuwenig gesehen, wie alle Menschen vor dir. Du hast zuviel geweint, vielleicht auch zuwenig, wie alle Menschen vor dir. Vielleicht hast du zuviel geliebt, und gehaßt - aber nu wenige Jahre - zwanzig oder so. Was sind schon zwanzig Jahre? Dann war ein Teil von dir tot, genau wie bei allen Menschen, die nicht mehr lieben oder hassen können.
Du hast viele Schmerzen ertragen, ungern wie alle Menschen vor dir. Dein Körper war dir sehr bald lästig. Du hast ihn nie geliebt. Das war schlecht für dich - oder auch gut, denn an einem ungeliebten Körper hängt die Seele nicht sehr. Und was ist die Seele? Wahrscheinlich hast du nie eine gehabt, nur Verstand, und der war nicht gedenkend der Gefühle. Oder war da manchmal noch etwas anderes? Für Augenblicke? Beim Anblick von Glockenblumen oder Katzenaugen und des Kummers um einen Menschen, oder gewisser Steine, Bäume und Statuen; der Schwalben über der großen Stadt Rom.
Mach dir keine Sorgen.
Auch wenn du mir einer Seele behaftet wärest, sie wünscht nichts als tiefen, traumlosen Schlaf. Der ungeliebte Körper wird nicht mehr schmerzen. Blut, Fleisch, Knochen und Haut, alles wird ein Häufchen Asche sein, und auch das Gehirn wird endlich aufhören zu denken. Dafür sei Gott bedankt, den es nicht gibt.
Mach dir keineSorgen - alles wird vergebens gewesen sein - wie bei allen Menschen vor dir. Eine völlig normale Geschichte.”
― Marlen Haushofer

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

“I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.”
― Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

“Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way than this:

where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. ”
― Pablo Neruda

“stay strong through your pain
grow flowers from it
you have helped me
grow flowers out of mine so
bloom beautifully
dangerously
loudly
bloom softly
however you need
just bloom”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and honey

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories... water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am in a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight,
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave bereft
I am not there. I have not left.”
― Mary Elizabeth Frye

“The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“My kids are starting to notice I'm a little different from the other dads. "Why don't you have a straight job like everyone else?" they asked me the other day.

I told them this story:
In the forest, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. Every day, the straight tree would say to the crooked tree, "Look at me...I'm tall, and I'm straight, and I'm handsome. Look at you...you're all crooked and bent over. No one wants to look at you." And they grew up in that forest together. And then one day the loggers came, and they saw the crooked tree and the straight tree, and they said, "Just cut the straight trees and leave the rest." So the loggers turned all the straight trees into lumber and toothpicks and paper. And the crooked tree is still there, growing stronger and stranger every day.”
― Tom Waits