Barbora > Barbora's Quotes

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
― Aldous Huxley

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
― Mark Twain

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“What makes us the most normal," said Reiko, "is knowing that we're not normal.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“It's certainly not too late to change to the winning side. But you know, you also have the freedom to stay just where you are. That's what it means to be an American. That's the miracle of America. Freedom to believe means the freedom to believe the wrong thing, after all. Just as freedom of speech gives you the right to stay silent.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods: Tenth Anniversary

“The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

“He just thought quietly, 'So this is love. I see, I was wrong about it too', thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. [...] 'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly. 'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.”
― John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

“I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash

“…[Changers] were a threat to identity, a challenge to the individualism even of those they were never likely to impersonate. It had nothing to do with souls or physical or spiritual possession; it was, as the Idirans well understood, the behavouristic copying of another which revolted. Individuality, the thing which most humans held more precious than anything else about themselves, was somehow cheapened by the ease with which a Changer could ignore it as a limitation and use it as a disguise.”
― Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

“What I sometimes mistake for ecstasy is simply the absence of grief.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“There's not a drug on earth can make life meaningful”
― Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis

“If you died it would be like my bones had been removed. No one would know why, but I would collapse.”
― Sarah Kane, Crave

“It is myself I have never met whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind”
― Sarah Kane

“It is very singular, how the fact of man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?”
― Jack Kerouac

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest mediaeval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet. It was the one thing that the modern Pre-raphaelites could not imitate in the real Pre-raphaelites. Burne-Jones could never recover the deep levity of the Middle Ages. In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
― G.K. Chesterton