Esther > Esther's Quotes

“You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“I love staring at my books for hours just trying to decide which book to read next. Doing that is almost as fun as actually reading them.”
― Love The Stacks Bookstore

“Je ne suis pas plus moderne qu'ancien, pas plus Français que Chinois, et l'idée de la patrie c'est-à-dire l'obligation où l'on est de vivre sur un coin de terre marqué en rouge ou en bleu sur la carte et de détester les autres coins en vert ou en noir m'a paru toujours étroite, bornée et d'une stupidité féroce.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance

“When we stop believing in gods we can start believing in their stories, I retort. There are of course no such things as miracles, but if there were and so tomorrow we woke up to find no more believers on earth, no more devout Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, why then, sure the beauty of the stories would be a thing we could focus on because they wouldn't be dangerous any more, they would become capable of compelling the only belief that leads to truth, that is, the willing, disbelieving of the reader in a well-told tale.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

“Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there – rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Grief is a swallow,” he said. “One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“„Vielleicht ist das Erinnern für mich auch wie ein zugefrorener See – trüb und glatt -, an dessen Oberfläche sich von Zeit zu Zeit ein Riss auftut, durch den ich meine Hand stecken und ein Detail, eine Erinnerung im kalten Wasser fassen kann. Doch zugefrorene Seen sind heimtückisch. Mal erwischt man einen Fisch, ein anderes Mal bricht man ein und ertrinkt.”
― Bastašić, Lana