Elham > Elham's Quotes

“In eternity there is no time, only an instant long enough for a joke.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering...”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.”
― Albert Camus

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“چرخ یک گاری در حسرت واماندن اسب
اسب در حسرت خوابیدن گاریچی
مرد گاریچی در حسرت مرگ”
― سهراب سپهری / Sohrab Sepehri

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“He's a wallflower. You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“Life has more imagination than we do.”
― Truffaut François

“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
― Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

“Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles

“What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation.”
― St. Augustine

“If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved or affected by those events. You have no stories to relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange ones that mean nothing to you at all. And it's as if the history of a particular place knows all about this blankness you contain. Consequently if you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable for the reason that it doesn't matter how many years you have lived there you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay.
And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind.
Opening out at last; out, out, out
And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenceless sky.

All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

“It was not so much that he lied as that there was no truth to tell. He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro