kell_xavi > kell_xavi's Quotes

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
― Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

“There are all kinds of love in this world but never the same love twice.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Appell

“life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis”
― E.E. Cummings

“Shogo. I know I'm repeating myself, but I have to say it. If I were Keiko, this is what I'd say. Please Live. Talk, think, act. And sometimes listen to music... Look at paintings at times to be moved. Laugh a lot, and at times, cry. And if you find a wonderful girl, then you go for her and love her.”
― Koushun Takami, Battle Royale

“Maybe convincing yourself that you could never transition is a defense mechanism that enabled you to survive high school, family, work—but like most defense mechanisms, it wasn’t conscious, and like most defense mechanisms, it became a pattern you weren’t aware of, and then, like most defense mechanisms, at some point it stopped making your life easier and started making your life harder.”
― Imogen Binnie, Nevada

“I believe there is power in words, power in asserting our existence, our experience, our lives, through words.”
― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

“The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening.”
― Louise Erdrich, Future Home of the Living God

“The structure of straight coupledom still represents an appropriation of the physical and psychic energy of women to benefit men. And insofar as gay people re-create the straight couple, this structure of violence, domination, and emotional paucity is what they are re-creating. Whatever Beyoncé says about not making a big deal out of the little things, marriage is no more the logical full extension of sexual desire than prison is the utmost expression of sheltering from a rainstorm”
― Hannah Black

“Strength and weakness are tangled things,” the Aven Essen had said. “They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
― Franz Kafka

“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable. It’s true. I speak from experience.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“People say “sell your soul” like it’s easy. But your soul is yours and it’s not for sale. Even if you try, it’ll still be there, waiting for you to remember it.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Friday Black: Stories

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin

“A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Extremism begets extremism. Its stripe and shape is irrelevant because radical evil is always committed in the name of a greater good, whether clothed as progress or tradition. In an interdependent world, the atrocities beyond our imagined borders do not solely express the cruelty of others; they are also connected with our own beliefs and actions, our glorification of greed, our cynical geopolitical games, which we sanitize and justify with our political sophistication. In ancient times, the Buddhist pilgrims in Bamiyan would have simply called it karma: what we release into the universe now will come back to us in the future.”
― Payam Akhavan, In Search of A Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey

“I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.”
― Ferdinand de Saussure

“Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.”
― Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics