Juan Ocampo > Juan's Quotes

“don’t rush though: your eyes need time to taste. your soul needs room to bloom.”
― Kwame Alexander, How to Read a Book

“Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.”
― Joe Queenan, One for the Books

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
― Martin Buber

“When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
― Martin Buber

“An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.”
― Martin Buber

“So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk.”
― William Vollmann

“I studied Comparative Literature at Cornell. Structuralism was real big then. The idea of reading and writing as being this language game. There's a lot of appeal to that. It's nice to think of it as this playful kind of thing. But I think that another way to look at it is "Look, I just want to be sincere. I want to write something and make you feel something and maybe you will go out and do something." And it seems that the world is in such bad shape now that we don't have time to do nothing but language games. That's how it seems to me.”
― William T. Vollmann

“I wish to live in peace with myself and not with the world.”
― Danilo Kiš, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich

“I dislike people who get out of things unscraped. No scars, no scratches. Agnosceo veteris vestigia flamme. Refined through a scar.”
― Danilo Kiš

“...the reading of many books brings wisdom, and the reading of one brings ignorance armed with rage and hatred.”
― Danilo Kiš

“Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.”
― Danilo Kiš, Garden, Ashes

“Y no permita que la literatura, en su caso, sustituya al amor. La literatura también es peligrosa. La vida no se puede reemplazar con nada.”
― Danilo Kiš, The Lute and the Scars

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

“Perhaps, somewhere, some day, at a less miserable time, we may see each other again.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“If there is anything of which I am certain in life it is that I shall never exchange the liberty of my exile for the vile parody of home.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“¿Qué podemos decir que sea cierto, de la poesía? Pues que ahí está. En el acorde de dos notas que hechizan e impiden escuchar el resto de la música, en la imprecisa tensión de dos colores que se tocan, en la línea que contornea una forma, acariciándola; en la sencilla frase leída que captura algo de nosotros, por un instante nos ata y nos deja como cualquier amante; y también en la ternura del sol que cae como un gigante cansado en los ocasos, en la magnificencia de una abeja sobre un pétalo, en la caricia del agua cayendo sobre la piel de un cuerpo amado, en la opacidad de la vieja tetera de la abuela, en el aroma de nuestras vidas depositado en los armarios; o en el leve giro de una mirada que embruja y nos deja a punto de caer en el amor; y en todas las cosas que en amor o en dolor, amargura o gozo, vienen a nosotros tocadas por el encanto de lo que simplemente es bello: la poesía está”
― Fernando Molano Vargas, Vista desde una acera

“There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist?”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. ”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

“Lo que ocurre es que la gente no tolera el humor, lo nuevo y lo grande. Es preciso estar dotado de grandeza para no meter al artista creador dentro de la gran bolsa de los ruidos.”
― Alberto Laiseca, Los Sorias

“There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays