Joanna > Joanna's Quotes

“The right words always seemed to come too late.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say 'he feels deeply, he feels tenderly'.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
― Eugene Ionesco

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!”
― Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Did I want him to act? Or would I prefer a lifetime of longing provided we both kept this little Ping-Pong game going: not knowing, not-not-knowing, not-not-not-knowing? Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can't say "yes," don't say "no," say "later." Is this why people say "maybe" when they mean "yes," but hope you'll think it's "no" when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him 'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Whoever said the soul and the body met in the pineal gland was a fool. It's the asshole, stupid.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We belonged to each other, but had lived so far apart that we belonged to others now.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Uma das coisas que os intelectuais fazem é justamente tornar questões inacessíveis, por várias razões de dominação e de interesse pessoal. É muito natural para os intelectuais fazerem as coisas simples parecerem difíceis. É o mesmo motivo que levava a Igreja medieval a criar mistérios. Aquilo era importante. Leia o grande inquisidor de Dostoievsky, ele diz de uma forma magnífica. O grande inquisidor explica que você deve criar mistérios porque de outra forma as pessoas comuns vão entender as coisas e elas devem permanecer subordinadas, então você tem de fazer as coisas parecerem misteriosas e complicadas. Esse é o teste do intelectual. É também bom para eles.”
― Noam Chomsky, Notes on Anarchism

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything really meaningful to say.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.”
― Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

“The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the appreciation of nature, recognition of the shortness of life, empathy, compassion, and so on. Rather, having imbibed the ideals that art displays, we should fight to attain in reality the things art merely symbolises, however graciously and intently. The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary”
― Alain de Botton, Art as Therapy

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner." I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
― Carl R. Rogers, A Way of Being

“I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming.”
― Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
― Carl R. Rogers

“You know that I don't believe that anyone has ever taught anything to anyone. I question that efficacy of teaching. The only thing that I know is that anyone who wants to learn will learn. And maybe a teacher is a facilitator, a person who puts things down and shows people how exciting and wonderful it is and asks them to eat.”
― Carl R. Rogers