Viviana > Viviana's Quotes

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#1

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

177816 likes

#2

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

tags: life

4054 likes

#3

“Who hears music, feels his solitude
Peopled at once.”
― Robert Browning, The complete poetical works of Browning

tags: music, power-of-music, solitude

1075 likes

#4

“Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
― Franz Kafka

tags: books, castle, self

4159 likes

#5

“Morning is wonderful. Its only drawback is that it comes at such an inconvenient time of day.”
― Glen Cook, Sweet Silver Blues

tags: morning, waking-up

2789 likes

#6

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: foresight, knowledge, women

1599 likes

#7

“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

tags: truth, writing

1134 likes

#8

“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: memory, pain

2007 likes

#9

“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: dreams, the-past, youth

819 likes

#10

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”
― Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

tags: language, senses

523 likes

#11

“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: freedom, stories

1795 likes

#12

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: memory, reality, return

523 likes

#13

“But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.”
― Margaret Atwood

340 likes

#14

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: advice

394 likes

#15

“The best way of keeping a secret is to pretend there isn't one.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: secrets

492 likes

#16

“Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.”
― Margaret Atwood

tags: love

227 likes

#17

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: perspective

528 likes

#18

“What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: forgiveness, last-page, love, the-threshold

193 likes

#19

“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: conflict, story, unhappiness

257 likes

#20

“How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: carelessness, despair, ignorance, insight, loneliness, love, sorrow, wisdom

304 likes

#21

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: future, hope, insatiability

265 likes

#22

“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

tags: memory, remembrance, the-past

1160 likes

#23

“Was that the beginning, that evening—on the dock of Avilion, with the fireworks dazzling the sky? It's hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: beginnings

206 likes

#24

“Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.”
― Margaret Atwood

tags: addiction, habit

160 likes

#25

“What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: archetype, childhood, motherhood, projection, psychology

171 likes

#26

“A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they've learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?”
― Margaret Atwood, Der blinde Mörder

tags: food, marketing, philosophy, religion

70 likes

#27

“I was sand, I was snow—written on, rewritten, smoothed over.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

123 likes

#28

“The picture is of happiness, the story not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

60 likes

#29

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
― Jack London

tags: days, existence, function, living, mankind, wasting-time

841 likes

#30

“Vivem em nós inúmeros, se penso ou sinto, ignoro quem é que pensa ou sente, sou somente o lugar onde se pensa e sente e, não acabando aqui, é como se acabasse, uma vez que para além de pensar e sentir não há mais nada.”
― José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

10 likes

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