Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“And I realized how much more complicated life is without the benefit of magic. Rubbing linseed oil into my blistered hands, I thought wistfully of how magic lets you skip over the steps of things. That is what makes it so appealing.
But, I thought, the steps of things are where life is truly found, in doing the day-to-day tasks.”
― Edith Pattou, East

“That's the trouble with loving a wild thing: You're always left watching the door.”
― Edith Pattou, East

“Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.”
― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“They forgot that the world doesn’t run on information. People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings.”
― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture.<...> Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons.”
― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.”
― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“Self-control is an illusion. It’s an illusion that occurs when both brains are aligned and pursuing the same course of action.”
― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.”
― Mark Manson, Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

“But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.”
― Milan Kundera

“You can't measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange.”
― Milan Kundera

“Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Making love with a woman and sleeping with a woman are two separate passions, not merely different but opposite. Love does not make itself felt in the desire for copulation (a desire that extends to an infinite number of women) but in the desire for shared sleep (a desire limited to one woman).”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
― Milan Kundera

“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Still, even in those years on Jeval, there was some cord that tied me to my father. That made me feel like he was mine. And that’s what I’d held onto in those minutes, watching the doors of the pier and waiting for him to walk through them.”
― Adrienne Young

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
― Milan Kundera

“Sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, nothing lasts forever.”
― Steven Callahan, Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“The Christian theologian Richard R. Niebuhr wrote, “Pilgrims are persons in motion—passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word ‘clarity’ will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit’s compass points the way.”
― Elizabeth Letts

“She realized it had never been love between them, for you cannot love someone you can never know.”
― Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons