ele > ele's Quotes

“It is not beauty that endears, it's love that makes us see beauty.”
― Leo Tolstoy

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
― C.G. Jung

“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― Emily Jane Brontë , Wuthering Heights

“Our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Her carriage bespoke an exquisite misery, a wretchedness so perfect and so absolute that it manifested as dignity, as calm. More than a dark horse, she was darkness itself, the cloak of it.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“The beauty of the world...has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
― Virginia Woolf

“It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.”
― Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“If her mind has a glittery radiance, mine is dark and loamy, preternaturally attuned to sorrow.”
― Leah Hager Cohen, No Book but the World

“The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
― C.G. Jung

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
― Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“Love's a grand solace, isn't it, my friend? Deep and dark as sleep.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit

“A little girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is fixed.”
― R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

“We are so bored of our unreal lives it is a change, at least; it is history happening.”
― Clare Pollard, Delphi

“I have a theory about the internet - that it's filled a void left by the decline in religion. Social media has filled the void. Our whole lives will be archived and remembered - it is always looking, watching, tracking. Saving us.”
― Clare Pollard, Delphi

“In a globalized world, there are few purchases or gestures that do not - like the flicker of a butterfly's wings - negatively affect someone on earth. With almost every daily action I contribute to world misery. If to be good is not to harm others, then I live within a system that has made goodness impossible.”
― Clare Pollard, Delphi

“Force our every interaction online so they can scrape it for data and sell predictions to shadowy forces of what we'll do before we know ourselves.”
― Clare Pollard, Delphi

“Tragedy is all about unity of place. This year every family gets its own tiny tragedy. A small cast of actors, and social media as the chorus.”
― Clare Pollard

“We had heard the Good News. As has everyone on the whole planet, including those hunter-gatherers who live deep in the rain forest and were trying for no contact. Just once I wish someone would say that and the Good News would turn out to be something else.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather

“She talked about the difference between falling and floating. With practice, one may learn to accept the feeling of groundlessness without existential fear. Akin to the way an astronaut might enjoy the wide view from above even as he hurtles through space. She gave us a formula: suffering = pain + resitance.”
― Jenny Offill, Weather