Julia > Julia's Quotes

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“His unlived life worried him, tortured him, turning round and round inside him like an animal in a cage. In Dodo's body, the body of a half-wit, somebody was growing old, although he had not lived; somebody was maturing to a death that had no meaning at all.”
― Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“She now knew that the death she feared might not be a physical one, that it could be death of the will, the soul, the mind, the laws, and thus not death, but a perpetual dying.”
― Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I have vague memories, like impressions on glass plates ...”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“It seemed as if the whole of the world was slowly being stripped of innocence. Or maybe I was seeing a little too clearly.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“We do not really know what draws a human being out into the world. Is it curiosity? A hunger for experience? An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart. If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him—the delight in life.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus

“When man meets an obstacle he can't destroy, he destroys himself”
― Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Other

“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”
― Elie Wiesel, Night

“The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

“An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one’s eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order of being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently.”
― Bruno Schulz

“Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“I am half child, half ancient.”
― Björk

“You show me continents, I see the islands, You count the centuries, I blink my eyes.”
― Bjork

“Some lose all mind and become soul,insane.
some lose all soul and become mind, intellectual.
some lose both and become accepted”
― Charles Bukowski

“When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?”
― Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons

“She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“You're looking so well, darling. You really are. They've done a marvelous job. I don't know what sort of cream they've put on you down at the morgue, but I want some. Honestly, you look better than you have in years. You look like you're alive!”
― Wes Anderson

“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.”
― Hermann Hesse

“After a sleepless night the body gets weaker,
It becomes dear and not yours - and nobody's.
Just like a seraph you smile to people
And arrows moan in the slow arteries.

After a sleepless night the arms get weaker
And deeply equal to you are the friend and foe.
Smells like Florence in the frost, and in each
Sudden sound is the whole rainbow.

Tenderly light the lips, and the shadow's golden
Near the sunken eyes. Here the night has sparked
This brilliant likeness - and from the dark night
Only just one thing - the eyes - are growing dark.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva

“Somewhere in the night a
human being is drowning.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea