Polina Traore > Polina's Quotes

“You don’t want a cheap Strat. Everybody has it. What you want is a rare model. The one that’s very hard to get. And only a guitar you’ve put a lot of effort into buying would end up being the most important in your collection. Do you get it?”
― Polina Traore, Never a Dream

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely.”
― William Faulkner

“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
― Albert Camus, L'Étranger

“But,' I reminded myself, 'it's common knowledge that life isn't worth living, anyhow.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot,the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition? The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; but suggesting that the proper stuff for fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The possible ranks higher than the actual.”
― Martin Heidegger

“The small are always dependent on the great; they are "small" precisely because they think they are independent. The great thinker is one who can hear what is greatest in the work of other "greats" and who can transform it in an original manner.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Freedom is only to be found where there is burden to be shouldered. In creative achievements this burden always represents an imperative and a need that weighs heavily upon man’s mood, so that he comes to be in a mood of melancholy. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of the fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholy mood is creative.”
― Martin Heidegger

“Thus "phenomenology" means αποφαινεσθαι τα φαινομενα -- to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

“We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.”
― Plato, Meno

“Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Damned