Librera Sin Chaleco > Librera's Quotes

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile”
― E.E. Cummings, E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all.”
― Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

“I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Encontrar a alguien inagotable es simplemente la definición del amor.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“Nos desprendemos de tantas cosas propias para poder curarnos lo más rápido posible que a la edad de treinta ya estamos en bancarrota y cada vez tenemos menos que ofrecer cuando empezamos una nueva relación con alguien. Sin embargo, no sentir nada por miedo a sentir algo es un desperdicio.”
― André Aciman, Secular Spirituality: Passionate Journey to a Rational Judaism