Maria Botnari > Maria's Quotes

“Our friends - how distant, how mute, how seldom visited and little known. And
I, too, am dim to my friends and unknown; a phantom, sometimes seen, often
not. Life is a dream surely.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the
incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go
to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among
phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty
enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all,
yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so
unspeakably lonely.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death…”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.
How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how
painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up,
become part of another.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Something irrevocable has happened. A circle has been cast on the
waters; a chain is imposed. We shall never flow freely again.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Oh, to awake from dreaming!”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“Heaven be praised for solitude!”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“faces and faces, served out like soup-plates by scullions; coarse, greedy, casual; looking in at shopwindows with pendent parcels; ogling, brushing, destroying everything, leaving even our love impure, touched now by their dirty fingers.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue--the penalty of living in an old civilisation with a notebook.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”
― Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon

“Dirge Without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.”
― Albert Camus

“The only obsession everyone wants: 'love.' People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you're whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You're whole, and then you're cracked open. ”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.”
― Philip Roth, Indignation

“You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more.”
― Philip Roth, The Dying Animal

“You go to someone and you think, 'I’ll tell him this.' But why? The impulse is that the telling is going to relieve you. And that’s why you feel awful later—you’ve relieved yourself, and if it truly is tragic and awful, it’s not better, it’s worse—the exhibitionism inherent to a confession has only made the misery worse.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

“Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth

“As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must simply say what one felt.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway