E.C. > E.C.'s Quotes

“He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...”
― Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England

“Holding someone's hand was always my idea of joy. Often before falling asleep - in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and enter the greater world - often, before having the courage to go toward the greatness of sleep, I pretend that someone is holding my hand and I go, go toward the enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even then I can't find the courage, then I dream.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“But I have to say this in defense of humankind: In no matter what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got here. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these games going on that could make you act crazy, even if you weren't crazy to begin with. Some of the crazymaking games going on today are love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf, and girls' basketball.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“It doesn't make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead.”
― joseph heller, Catch-22

“I just know that I don't want cheating. I refuse. I deepened myself but I don't believe in myself because my thought is invented.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“...she cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.”
― Irene Nemirovsky

“She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and
amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.
He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in
stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing
gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a
Well-digger's posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the
nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin