Ravi Singh > Ravi's Quotes

“I hate and I love
Why do I, you ask ?
I don't know, but it's happening
and it hurts”
― Catullus

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“All I ever wanted was a world without maps.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant who reminisces or remembers a meeting when the other has passed by innocently…but all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“...the heart is an organ of fire.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Her hand touched me at the wrist. "If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn't you?"

I didn't say anything.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I'll be looking at the moon,
but I'll be seeing you.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now, that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Every night I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of pre-occuopation.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison – thinking you can cure them by sharing it – you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.

Half my days I cannot bear to touch you.
The rest of my time I feel like it doesn’t matter if I will ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it’s how much you can bear.

No date. No name attached.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Tutto fu ambito e tutto fu tentato. Quel che non fu fatto io lo sognai e tanto era l'ardore che il sogno eguagliò l'atto.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio

“Il rimpianto è il vano pascolo d'uno spirito disoccupato. Bisogna soprattutto evitare il rimpianto occupando sempre lo spirito con nuove sensazioni e nuove immaginazioni.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio

“Vivere ardendo e non bruciarsi mai”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio

“It was the beginning of June; summer was arising out of spring, like an aloe from a field of grass.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Book of the Virgins

“They remained silent, while the bronze tolling passed over their heads so powerfully that they seemed to hear it in the very roots of their hair like a quiver of their flesh.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“He followed the glances of some of them like a ray of love directed at a woman seated somewhere, engrossed in her own thoughts, made languorous by secret delights and softened in some impure way, with a snow-white face in which her mouth opened like a hive damp with honey.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The flame = (il fuoco) - Scholar's Choice Edition

“That which at twilight had appeared to be a silvery sea-god's palace, a structure of twisted sea-shapes, was now a temple built by the cunning genies of Fire.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“The woman bent down to pick up the fallen pomegranate from the grass. It was ripe, it had burst open in the fall, stained her white dress. The vision of the laden barge, the pale island, the flowery meadow returned to her loving spirit along with the Creator's words: 'This is my body...Take and eat...”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“The heat of his night time fever was being brushed away entirely by the breeze as the light mists evaporated. The same process that was happening around him, was happening within him too. He was being reborn with the morning.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“Radian. The prisoner's name is Radiana.
Who is keeping her prisoner?
Time, Stelio. Time is guarding the doors with his scythe and his hour-glass, as in all those old prints...”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame

“It was like a Stygian plain, like a vision of Hades: a land of shadows, vapours and water. Everything was going misty and disappearing like spirits. The moon was enchanting and pulling at the plain just as she enchants and pulls at the sea, drinking all that vast earthly dampness from the horizon with her silent, insatiable throat.”
― Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Flame