Patricia > Patricia's Quotes

“The work of memory collapses time.”
― Walter Benjamin

“Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.”
― James Joyce

“For if one is partly insane, one is also, juridically, partly sane, and if one is partly sane one is at least partly responsible for one's actions, and if one is partly responsible one is wholly responsible; for responsibility is, as they say, that state in which the individual has the power to devote himself to a specific purpose of his own free will, independently of any compelling necessity, and one cannot simultaneously possess and lack such self-determination.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities: Volume I

“I wish to go beyond the fire that burns me.”
― Petrarch

“Living is a horizontal fall.”
― Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Illustrated Diary of His Cure

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

“I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more. ”
― Theodore Roethke

“No it is not easy to write. It is as hard as breaking rocks. Sparks and splinters fly like shattered steel.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“What matters for the dialectician is having the wind of world history in his sails. Thinking for him means: to set the sails. It is the way they are set that matters. Words are his sails. The way they are set turns them into concepts.”
― Walter Benjamin

“But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.”
― Virginia Woolf

“The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Once, Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a ship for several hours, during a furious storm, so that he could later paint the storm. Obviously, it was not the storm itself that Turner intended to paint. What he intended to paint was a representation of the storm. One's language is frequently imprecise in that manner, I have discovered.”
― David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”
― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

“You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.”
― Doris Lessing

“Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.”
― Doris Lessing

“There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”
― Doris May Lessing, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949

“I ask myself: is every story that has ever been written in this world, a story of suffering and affliction?

”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”
― Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke

“I have gone into the waste lonely places”
― Theodore Roethke

“What falls away is always. And is near.”
― Theodore Roethke

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.”
― Theodore Roethke

“Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.”
― Jorge Luis Borges