Larissa > Larissa's Quotes

“She wasn't a person to whom things happen. She did all the happenings.”
― Muriel Spark, Aiding and Abetting

“Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.”
― Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist

“Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.”
― Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier

“My thoughts are an ocean, they wash woefully up against their limits.”
― Nescio, Amsterdam Stories

“Every reader his or her book.
Every book its reader.”
― S.R. Ranganathan

“Now here's the heavy irony. So I went back to New York to become a librarian. To actually seek out this thing I've been fleeing all my life. and (here it comes): a librarian is just not that easy to become...Apparently there's a whole filing system and annotating system and stamping system and God knows what you have to learn before you qualify.”
― Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

“...Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language.”
― Frans G. Bengtsson, The Long Ships

“Can a person who has been brought up in the heart of a thick dark forest, where one has to beat a path through multiple layers of trees just to take a letter to the post office, have any conception of what it’s like to spend one’s entire childhood waiting for a single tree to grow?”
― Audur Ava Olafsdottir, The Greenhouse

“I think you’re more an archivist than a librarian,” he said.

He told me that archivists and librarians were opposite personas. True librarians are unsentimental. They’re pragmatic, concerned with the newest, cleanest, most popular books. Archivists, on the other hand, are only peripherally interested in what other people like, and much prefer the rare to the useful.

”They like everything,” he said, “gum wrappers as much as books.” He said this with a hint of disdain.

”Librarians like throwing away garbage to make space, but archivists,” he said, “they’re too crazy to throw anything out.”

”You’re right,” I said. ”I’m more of an archivist.”

”And I’m more of a librarian,” he said.

”Can we still be friends?”
― Avi Steinberg, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

“He'd always had a quickening of the heart when he crossed into Arizona and beheld the cactus country. This was as the desert should be, this was the desert of the picture books, with the land unrolled to the farthest distant horizon hills, with saguaro standing sentinel in their strange chessboard pattern, towering supinely above the fans of ocotillo and brushy mesquite.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, The Expendable Man

“I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters.”
― J.D. Salinger, Teddy

“Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything that we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partially responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens, or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone—though not necessarily to the same person—and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping might scrutinize, set aside, and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once, although...it must be told when the time is right, or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognize that right moment or deliberately let it pass, there will never again be another.”
― Javier Marías, All Souls

“He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.”
― Stefan Zweig

“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“To put it squarely, as I say in my memoir, the eternal triangle has come full circle.”
― Muriel Spark, Not to Disturb

“It's easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don't bring you oysters. (Paul Child)”
― Julia Child, My Life in France

“Megnið af volæði veraldarinnar stafar af skorti á ímyndunarafli.”
― Þórbergur Þórðarson, Bréf til Láru

“I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.”
― Haruki Murakami

“I always feel myself being thrust back into loneliness when someone tells me it's cold on a hot day. It isn't good to talk so much about the weather — weather is a highly personal matter, and communication on the subject inevitably fails.”
― Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear

“Her father was stern. Her father disapproved. Her father had very strong reservations...Half Belgian, half Persian, staunch British conservative, he'd seen the Himalayas and Harrogate and had chosen accountancy.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is...It's the never-ending leaf-fall.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“All over the apartment, there are lists that Myriam has written—on a paper napkin, on a Post-it, on the last page of a book. She spends her time looking for them. She is afraid to throw them away as if this might make her lose track of all the tasks she has to accomplish. She has kept some really old ones and, rereading them, she feels a nostalgia that is only intensified when she can no longer remember to what those obscure notes refer.

Pharmacy
Tell Mila Nil’s story
Reservations for Greece
Call M.
Reread all my notes
Go back to that shop. Buy the dress?
Reread Maupassant
Get him a surprise?”
― Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny

“Whoa was us.”
― George Saunders, Fox 8