merixien > merixien's Quotes

“In life, only potential was free. The outcome, the achievement, the aim came at a high cost, which she was prepared to pay.”
― Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees

“The miracle would have been if those arrogant fools with the fate of the country in their hands had listened in time to the voices of the experts. Now it was too late.”
― Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees

“Life offers no guarantees. To anyone. It waits for nobody. It has no consideration for anyone.”
― Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees

“Tell them to walk in the shade. To listen with their eyes, to see with their skin, and to feel with their ears, because life speaks to us all and we just need to know and wait to listen to it, see it, feel it.”
― Sofía Segovia, The Murmur of Bees

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image,”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.”
― Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays

“Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

“Childhood is dark and it’s always moaning like a little animal that’s locked in a cellar and forgotten. It comes out of your throat like your breath in the cold, and sometimes it’s too little, other times too big. It never fits exactly. It’s only when it has been cast off that you can look at it calmly and talk about it like an illness you’ve survived.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

“That’s the worst thing about grownups, I think – they can never admit that just once in their lives they’ve acted wrongly or irresponsibly. They’re so quick to judge others, but they never hold Judgement Day for themselves.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

“Time passed and my childhood grew thin and flat, paperlike. It was tired and threadbare, and in low moments it didn’t look like it would last until I was grown up.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood

“childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.”
― Tove Ditlevsen, Childhood