inara > inara's Quotes

“Love fills everything. It cannot be desired because it is an end in itself. It cannot betray because it has nothing to do with possession. It cannot be held prisoner because it is a river and will overflow its banks. Anyone who tries to imprison love will cut off the spring that feeds it, and the trapped water will grow stagnant.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“By you, I am forever undone.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“And yet my heart is buried with you in the strange soil of the mortal world, as it was drowned with you in the cold waters of the undersea.
It was yours before I could ever admit it, and yours it shall ever remain.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I want
To do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“When you dance, do you feel desire? Do you feel as if you were summoning up a greater energy? When you dance, are there moments when you cease to be yourself?”
― Paolo Coelho, The Witch of Portobello

“Journeys end in lovers meeting; I have spent an all but sleepless night, I have told lies and made a fool of myself, and the very air tastes like wine. I have been frightened half out of my foolish wits, but I have somehow earned this joy; I have been waiting for it for so long.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“I know what you are learning to endure. There is nothing to be done. Make sure nothing is wasted. Take notes. Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“They wanted the real mother, the blood mother, the great womb, mother of fierce compassion, a woman large enough to hold all the pain, to carry it away. What we needed was someone who bled, someone deep and rich as a field, a wide-hipped mother, awesome, immense, women like huge soft couches, mothers coursing with blood, mother's big enough, wide enough for us to hide in, to sink down to the bottom of of, mother's who would breathe for us when we could not breathe anymore, who would fight for us, who would kill for us, die for us.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you've already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Love was a family religion, passed down to her when she'd been too young to protect herself from belief.”
― Holly Black, Book of Night

“She was a poisoned well of a girl.”
― Holly Black, Book of Night

“You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You don’t think monster girls and wicked boys deserve love?”
― Holly Black, How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories

“Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Through love, all is possible.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood

“I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can talk together freely and build our castles in the air.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“You must not allow yourself to be consumed so thoroughly by death. It’s not selfish to live.”
― Adalyn Grace, Belladonna