Arkasha > Arkasha's Quotes

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each other's arms, holding love, asleep.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“The male glance has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her--in other words, turning her into an object.

What is less commonly known is that a woman is not completely defenseless against that glance. If it turns her into an object, then she looks back at the man with the eyes of an object. It is though a hammer had suddenly grown eyes and stare up at the worker pounding a nail with it. When the worker sees the evil eye of the hammer, he loses his self-assurance and slams it on his thumb.

The worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“It was like the dark inverse of the sun. Whenever he tried to look at it he had the feeling of turning uncontrollably away from it, as in his unremembered dreams. All he knew was that once he let it out, it wouldn't be just the world that was drowned, but himself.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World

“It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”
― Milan Kundera

“Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: -

(1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities
(2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;
(3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Children, you are the future,' he said, and today I realize he did not mean it the way it sounded. The reason children are the future is not that they will one day be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“But one does not marry a set of virtues and talents; one marries an individual human being.”
― Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point

“It is easy to kill with a bow, girl. How easy it is to release the bowstring and think, it is not I, not I, it is the arrow. The blood of that boy is not on my hands. The arrow killed him, not I. But the arrow does not dream anything in the night. May you dream nothing in the night either,”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Sword of Destiny

“I'd never felt anything quite like it. For the first time in my life, everything was as it should be. Because the opposite of war... is fucking.”
― Brian K. Vaughan, Saga #17

“Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded is concentrated.”
― Milan Kundera, Immortality

“I don't want to be great, Zhu repeated. Her desire was the radiance of the sun, an immensity that filled every part of her without exception. Who else understood what it was to feel something of this magnitude; to want something with the entirety of their self, as she did? "I want to be the greatest.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World

“That's my body, but my body isn't me, she thought. The thing that feels your hands on me, that pleases you, isn't me. My body is for you, it isn't for me. She resided in her body an inch below the surface, wearing it like a doll, with a sense of ownership and pride, perhaps, but never fully being it.”
― Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World

“I’ve written something strange, deeply personal, highly subjective. I am a scientist studying his own soul, a snake swallowing its own tail.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“If we were to draw her childhood wanderings on a map, represent her discoveries and destinations in topographic form and trace her winding way through them, we would see her as a girl solving a maze from the center outward, a Minotaur working her way free.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January