Ilse > Ilse's Quotes

“Whoever doesn't live in poetry cannot survive here on earth.”
― Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier

“I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“Is this love reality
Or a dream?
I cannot know,
When both reality and dreams
Exist without truly existing.”
― Ono no Komachi, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“There's more to life than books, you know. But not much more.”
― Morrissey

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.”
― Rita Mae Brown

“Le succès est peu de choses, auprès d'une conscience en repos.”
― Vercors

“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You

“In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you’re gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.”
― Anna Akhmatova

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
― Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

“Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark.”
― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship

“As the future ripens in the past,
so the past rots in the future --
a terrible festival of dead leaves.”
― Anna Akhmatova, Poems of Akhmatova

“I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“Bullets they took from us, they took our rifles
Minerals they took, and comrades too:
But while our mouths have spittle in them
The whole country is still armed.”
― Marina Tsvetayeva

“Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters

“When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.”
― Montaigne, Les Essais

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.”
― Albert Schweitzer

“How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time.”
― W.G. Sebald

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.”
― Voltaire

“Your imagination, my dear fellow, is worth more than you imagine.”
― Louis Aragon

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?”
― Maurice Maeterlinck

“People speak sometimes about the "bestial" cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Touch has a memory.”
― John Keats

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal