Sophia Barry Gordon > Sophia's Quotes

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“I know all those words, but that sentence makes no sense to me.”
― Matt Groening

“All language is but a poor translation.”
― Franz Kafka

“Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
― Nelson Mandela

“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.”
― Ronald Reagan

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
― Frantz Fanon

“Gone. The saddest word in the language. In any language.”
― Mark Slouka, God's Fool

“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?”
― George Carlin

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“Shut your eyes and see.”
― James Joyce

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; a mí me enorgullecen las que he leído.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.”
― Henry James

“I don't want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.”
― Henry James

“She is written in a foreign tongue.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair