Salomé > Salomé's Quotes

“A thousand years ago five minutes were
Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.
Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and
Infinite aftertime: above your head
They close like giant wings, and you are dead.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
― Franz Kafka

“Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“In order to understand, I destroyed myself.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still”
― Sylvia Plath, Letters Home

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
and I eat men like air.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Be the flame, not the moth.”
― Giacomo Casanova

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Is there no way out of the mind?”
― Sylvia Plath

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor: he took my measure anew every time he saw me, whilst all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
― James Baldwin

“The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ”
― James Baldwin

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Love them that hate you, but you can't love those you hate.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“General benevolence, but not general friendship, make a man what he ought to be.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“We fear death, we shudder at life's instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“Art was a union of the father and mother worlds, of mind and blood. It might start in utter sensuality and lead to total abstraction; then again it might originate in pure concept and end in bleeding flesh. Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good juggler's trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master's madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality.”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.”
― William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
― Zora Neale Hurston