Carla > Carla's Quotes

“Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.”
― Philip Roth

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“How can you respect the world when you see it's being run by a bunch of kids turned old?”
― John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

“No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Os sentimentos mais genuinamente humanos logo se desumanizam na cidade.”
― José Maria Eça de Queirós

“Ser feliz é uma responsabilidade muito grande. Pouca gente tem coragem. Tenho coragem mas com um pouco de medo. Pessoa feliz é quem aceitou a morte. Quando estou feliz demais, sinto uma angústia amordaçante: assusto-me.”
― Clarice Lispector, A Breath of Life

“My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.”
― Marcel Proust

“What exactly was the difference? He wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?”
― John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

“In secret we met
In silence I grieve,
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.”
― George Gordon Byron

“When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
― Maya Angelou

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
― Maya Angelou

“I found the poems in the fields,
And only wrote them down.”
― John Clare, The Later Poems, 1837-1864

“All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded. ”
― Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern

“It's urgent-love.
It's urgent- a boat upon the sea.

It's urgent to destroy certain words,
hate, solitude, and cruelty,
some mornings,
many swords.

It's urgent to invent a joyfulness,
multiply kisses and cornfields,
discover roses and rivers
and glistening mornings- it's urgent.

Silence and an impure light fall upon our shoulders till they ache.
It's urgent- love, it's urgent
to endure.”
― Eugénio de Andrade, Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry

“These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off.”
― Giorgio Vasari

“As pedras ancestrais têm um nome
que todos sabem ser o dos avós.

À noite, quando os vivos dormem,
as pedras deslocam-se
trocam os poisos,
indagam uns pelos outros
seres que lhes dão vida,
servem-se de nomes
intransmissíveis,
afirmam fome.

Antes que a manhã venha perturbar
o sono dos vivos,
retomam o parecer quotidiano
de pedras antigas.
Cobrem-se de musgo,
captam orvalho.


Ruy Cinatti, «Antepassados»”
― Ruy Cinatti

“People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“cala-te patrão, não digas nada se não queres ser violado à bruta. Pensas que podes andar todos os dias em cima de mim com esses cabrões desses olhos azuis?”
― Rosa Lobato de Faria, A Alma Trocada

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“...o Inferno é ter braços mas ninguém a quem abraçar.”
― Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Himnaríki og helvíti

“O seu espírito era como aquela cisterna, água doce e pura selada sob a tampa de ferro, mas não seguramente potável.”
― Saul Bellow

“Sou feliz só por preguiça. A infelicidade dá uma trabalheira pior que doença: é preciso entrar e sair dela, afastar os que nos querem consolar, aceitar pêsames por uma porção da alma que nem chegou a falecer.”
― Mia Couto, Mar me Quer

“Who knows their own story? Certainly it makes no sense when we are living in the midst of it. It's all just clamor and confusion. It only becomes a story when we tell it and retell it. Our small precious recollections that we speak again and again to ourselves and to others, first creating the narrative of our lives and then keeping the story from dissolving into darkness.”
― Nick Cave

“Os filósofos deveriam ser pacientes e esperar, e não querer fundar uma soberania, nem um reino que se mantenha com os meios do seu tempo. Eles são os reis do vindouro, e as suas coroas ainda são unas com os minérios que enchem as veias das montanhas...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”
― John Banville, The Sea

“if monasteries accepted the irreligious and permitted abstention from prayer, I'd become a monk.”
― Henri Troyat, Chekhov

“I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”
― Dylan Thomas