Katherine Olivares > Katherine's Quotes

“Tengo la horrible sensación de que pasa el tiempo y no hago nada y nada acontece, y nada me conmueve hasta la raíz”
― Mario Benedetti, La tregua

“Francamente, no sé si creo en Dios. A veces imagino que, en el caso de que Dios exista, no habría de disgustarle esta duda.”
― Mario Benedetti, La tregua

“Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.
¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,
una sombra, una ficción,
y el mayor bien es pequeño:
que toda la vida es sueño,
y los sueños, sueños son”
― Pedro Calderon de la Barca, La vida es sueño / El alcalde de Zalamea

“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

“That's what's so great about the Internet. It allows pompous blow-hards to connect with other pompous blow-hards in a vast circle-jerk of pomposity.”
― Bill Maher

“I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. ”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Not being heard is no reason for silence.”
― Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables

“There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.”
― Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys

“Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space...”
― Mario Vargas Llosa

“¿Qué sentido tiene estar con alguien si no te cambia la vida?
[...] la vida sólo tenía sentido si encontrabas a alguien que te la cambiara, que destruyera tu vida.”
― Alejandro Zambra

“Very early in my life it was too late.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.”
― Rollo May

“La mentira es el único privilegio del hombre sobre todos los animales" - Crimen y Castigo”
― Fiodor M. Dostoievski

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , La vieillesse

“What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

“The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Question: I am interested in so many things, and I have a terrible fear because my mother keeps telling me that I'm just going to be exploring the rest of my life and never get anything done. But I find it really hard to set my ways and say, "Well, do I want to do this, or should I try to exploit that, or should I escape and completely do one thing?"

Anaïs Nin: One word I would banish from the dictionary is 'escape.' Just banish that and you'll be fine. Because that word has been misused regarding anybody who wanted to move away from a certain spot and wanted to grow. He was an escapist. You know if you forget that word you will have a much easier time. Also you're in the prime, the beginning of your life; you should experiment with everything, try everything.... We are taught all these dichotomies, and I only learned later that they could work in harmony. We have created false dichotomies; we create false ambivalences, and very painful one's sometimes -the feeling that we have to choose. But I think at one point we finally realize, sometimes subconsciously, whether or not we are really fitted for what we try and if it's what we want to do.

You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you're not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn't a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.”
― Anais Nin

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
― Margaret Atwood

“No existe ningún recuerdo por intenso que sea que no se apague...”
― Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo