Dide > Dide's Quotes

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Ik weet het: het mooiste zou zijn
als ik onvindbaar was
en altijd naar mijzelf bleef zoeken.
Hoe interessant zou dat niet zijn!
Maar ik ben zó vindbaar…
zó voor het oprapen…
doe het licht uit, struikel over mij!”
― Toon Tellegen

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Toen ging hij slapen, met zijn hoofd op de woorden waar hij het meest van hield: warm, alles, altijd, ik.”
― Toon Tellegen, Het vertrek van de mier

“Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself. Impossible. Confusing. Frustrating ... but there are other ways to understanding.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“People change and forget to tell each other.”
― Lillian Hellman

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Shut your eyes and see.”
― James Joyce

“The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an imitation, a thing that is said or unsaid. Sometimes it's who's at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point-- in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms-- it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me.”
― Renata Adler, Speedboat

“At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.”
― Virginia Wolfe

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Pheoby’s hungry listening helped Janie to tell her story. So she went on thinking back to her young years and explaining them to her friend in soft, easy phrases while all around the house, the night time put on flesh and blackness.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God