Yuli > Yuli's Quotes

“It was once said, and very rightly, that a man who is well brought-up may read anything. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words.”
― Jaroslav Hašek

“Those who boggle at strong language are cowards, because it is real life which is shocking them, and weaklings like that are the very people who cause most harm to culture and character. They would like to see the nation grow up into a group of over-sensitive little people--masturbators of false culture...”
― Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

“After debauches and orgies there always follows the moral hangover.”
― Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk

“The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything-- love, convictions, faith, history-- no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“...because love is continual interrogation. I don't know of a better definition of love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“Every love relationship rests on an unwritten agreement unthinkingly concluded by the lovers in the first weeks of their love. They are still in a kind of dream but at the same time, without knowing it, are drawing up, like uncompromising lawyers, the detailed clauses of their contract. O lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you've brought breakfast in bed you'll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“He was well aware that of the two of three thousand times he had made love (how many times had he made love in his life?) only two or three were really essential and unforgettable. The rest were mere echoes, imitations, repetitions, or reminiscences.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“The only secret people keep is immortality.”
― Emily Dickinson

“26. Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They do, however, expose their genitalia.”
― Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout

“If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.”
― Abraham Sutzkever

“I don't know whether there is a God but there sure is someone acting out of spite”
― Abraham Sutzkever, Zielone Akwarium

“Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.”
― Reinaldo Arenas

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality...One can't possess reality, one can possess images--one can't possess the present but one can possess the past.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography

“What feminism means for me is simply that women, like men, are complete human beings with limitless possibilities.”
― Fahmida Riaz

“Life must not be a novel that is given to us, but one that is made by us. ”
― Novalis, Philosophical Writings

“Where are we really going? Always home.”
― Novalis

“In a work of art, chaos must shimmer through the veil of order.”
― Novalis

“A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.”
― Novalis

“Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”
― Novalis

“We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming.”
― Novalis, Philosophical Writings

“Every individual is the center of a system of emanation.”
― Novalis, Philosophical Writings

“Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.”
― Novalis