Cephalopod > Cephalopod's Quotes

“The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Depersonalization like the deposing of useless individuality— the loss of everything that can be lost, while still being. To take away from yourself little by little, with an effort so attentive that no pain is felt, to take away from yourself like one who gets free of her own skim, her own characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way I am most easily viewed by others and end up being superficially recognizable to myself.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

“It is curious that I can´t say who I am. That is to say, I know it all too well, but I can´t say it. More than anything, I´m afraid to say it, because the moment I try to speak not only do I fail to express what I feel but what I feel slowly becomes what I say.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-colored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“I think of beauty as something that dies; either it's destroyed by time or stupidity or I have only a moment to experience it, and then only memory after that; even if i can return and look again, I can't quite manage to get back the moment. So, to me, the beauty of the trees is like the beauty of death, as if death will mean wondering forever in the dim of those trees, the landscape funerealizes in its lushest profusion of green.”
― Michael Cisco

“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Life is full of paradoxes, as roses are of thorns.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I wander as I walk straight ahead. When it’s time, I show up at the office like everyone else. When it’s not time, I go to the river to gaze at the river, like everyone else. I’m no different. And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet