Ally > Ally's Quotes

“I suppose I love this life, in spite of my clenched fist.”
― Andrea Gibson

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Any business transaction—actually any life transaction—is negotiated by how you are making the other person feel.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It’s brave if you make it, foolish if you fail.”
― Stephanie Danler, Sweetbitter

“But you will be back, and you will always be here. Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most important part. That part of you will patiently be here as the earth changes colour, exhausts itself, breathes in fresh life again, and revives. That part of you will be here all along, through that whole entire time, while the slugs make their sluggish art, beautiful little swirls in the mud, and whatever will populate the sea, and the greatest beasts that will ever be; slippery with green gills and lots of scales, feathers and fur. Even the swimming creatures will have their own ways of moving which will be radically new. And you will be here for that, too! Why am I so stuck in the art of the past? Because you are stuck in this situation, thinking it is the only one. There will be a second draft, and the part of you that loves, which is the best part of you, and the most eternal part, will be in the bears, the lizards, the mammoths, and the birds, there in the second draft of life.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

“They're blind to a simple truth: complex minds can't develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don't grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein

“and you laugh.
loudly--
head tipping back.
and while your eyes
are on the ceiling,
i am mouthing
something too heavy even
for this steady night to shoulder.
‘this is not a joke.’ i mouth.
‘love me. love me.”
― Salma Deera, Letters From Medea

“Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever. —Aristophanes, Greek comic poet (c. 450–385 BCE)”
― Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses

“What does it mean to taste something and be transported to so many places at once, all of them a piece of home? To be half-elsewhere all the time, half-here and not-here. There are two sides of myself: one longing for the city, one at peace near the sea.”
― Nina Mingya Powles, Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke