Hemlyn > Hemlyn's Quotes

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”
― David Whyte, The House of Belonging

“Sometimes I say to a poem,

"I don't have the strength
To wring out another drop
Of the sun."

And the poem will often
Respond

By climbing onto a barroom table:

Then lifts its skirt, winks,
Causing the whole sky to
Fall.”
― شمس الدین محمد حافظ / Khwāja Šams ud-Dīn Muhammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī, The Gift

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut you more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few humans and even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need for God absolutely clear.”
― Hafiz

“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”
― Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.”
― Hafiz

“My dear,
Is it true that your mind is sometimes like a battering
Ram

Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out

About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?”
― شمس الدین محمد حافظ / Shams-al-Din Mohammad Hafez, The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems Inspired by Hafiz

“You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
Except the one in which you belong.”
― David Whyte

“There has to be a moment at the beginning where you wonder whether you’re in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself.
If the moment doesn’t pass, that’s it—you’re done.
And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it’s even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lovers’ face.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“ubiquitous, adj.

When it’s going well, the fact of it is everywhere. It’s there in the song that shuffles into your ears. It’s there in the book you’re reading. It’s there on the shelves of the store as you reach for a towel and forget about the towel. It’s there as you open the door. As you stare off into the subway, it’s what you’re looking at. You wear it on the inside of your hat. It lines your pockets. It’s the temperature.
The hitch, of course, it that when it’s going badly, it’s in all the same places.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“corrode, v.

I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open and it started to rust.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“breathtaking, adj.

Those mornings when we kiss and surrender for an hour before we say a single word.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“encroach, v.

The first three nights we spent together, I couldn't sleep. I wasn't used to your breathing, your feet on my legs, your weight in my bed. In truth, I still sleep better when I'm alone. But now I allow that sleep isn't always the most important thing.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“It daunted me that you were so beautiful, that you were so at ease in social situations, as if every room was heliotropic, with you at the center. And I guess it daunted you that I had so many more friends than you, that I could put my words together like this, on paper, and could sometimes conjure a certain sense out of things. The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“Things rarely get fixed the way they need to be.”
― David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary

“Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts, the rage addicts, the poverty addicts , and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and the tenderness the substances engender. An addict, if you don't mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, from the world's traffic and currency.”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

“Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices. It unleashes the tongue, teasing out secrets you never meant to tell, secrets you never even knew. It shouts, rants, whispers. It speaks of great plans, tragic loves, and terrible betrayals. It screams with laughter. It chuckles softly to itself. It weeps in front of its own reflection. It revives summers long past and memories best forgotten. Every bottle a whiff of other times, other places, everyone...a humble miracle”
― Joanne Harris

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
― Charles Bukowski

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
― Douglas Adams

“Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“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

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“belief is the death of intelligence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“You choose to give up or make an effort. There are only these two choices for humans to choose from. You have to honestly tell them your feelings. The rest is up to them. To make an effort, or to give up would then be their choice. It was the same for you. It’s the same for everyone.”
― Chica Umino

“there are worse things
than being alone
but it often takes
decades to realize this
and most often when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than too late”
― Charles Bukowski