Federica Rampi > Federica's Quotes

“I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Abide with Me

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Our imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I hope she'll be a fool -- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Talvolta penso che il paradiso sia leggere continuamente, senza fine.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Credo che non ti amerei tanto se in te non ci fosse nulla da lamentare, nulla da rimpiangere. Io non amo la gente perfetta, quelli che non sono mai caduti, non hanno inciampato. La loro è una virtù spenta, di poco valore. A loro non si è svelata la bellezza della vita.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Questa sera Tardegardo, come suo costume, si trattenne lunga pezza al verone a contemplare il notturno stellato. Io non ardii di raggiungerlo, ma vidi egualmente, da certo luccicore, ch’avea il guardo pieno di lagrime, e, al solito, ne provai viva pena. Mi parve anche che tremasse, e osservandolo meglio (pur discosto com’ero), che movesse le labbra alla volta della luna, splendidissima e tersa qual da tempo non si mostrava.”
― Michele Mari, Io venìa pien d'angoscia a rimirarti

“Am I in love? --yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

“There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl

“Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.”
― Edna O'Brien, The Lonely Girl

“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
― Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

“In life, if one wants seriously to understand how the world works, he must die at least once.”
― Giorgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

“Confessare, anche a se stessi, i propri desideri - quelli veri - è pericoloso. Se sono realizzabili, e spesso lo sono, dichiararli ti mette di fronte alla paura di provarci. E dunque alla tua vigliaccheria. Allora preferisci non pensarci, o pensare che hai desideri impossibili, e che è da adulti non pensare alle cose impossibili.”
― Gianrico Carofiglio, Reasonable Doubts

“Somebody once said that all people are either intelligent or stupid, and either lazy or enterprising. There are lazy idiots, usually irrelevant and innocuous; then there are the intelligent and ambitious, who can be given important tasks to perform. The greatest achievements, in all fields, are nearly always the work of those intelligent and lazy. But one thing should be kept in mind: the most dangerous category, the people who are unfailingly responsible for the most appalling disasters, the ones you have to avoid at all costs, are enterprising idiots.”
― Gianrico Carofiglio, Le perfezioni provvisorie

“Wisest is she who knows she does not know.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“People on the streets are dehumanized the same way settlers dehumanized the Indigenous, to steal the land of abundance at gunpoint, to tax the land to the fullest.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“To overcome the need to be productive, as a lot of productivity is destructive.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“The same people that outlawed the practice of Native American Medicine (without a colonizer centric degree), outlawed the traditional practice of healing those that are hurt/ill without expecting anything in return. Free healthcare. The basis of community.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“Where all was free, is free no more.”
― San Mateo, San Mateo: Proof of The Divine

“We are all broken, that's how the light gets in.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I fear a Man of frugal speech -
I fear a Silent Man -
Haranguer - I can overtake -
Or Babbler - entertain -

But He who weigheth - While the Rest -
Expend their furthest pound -
Of this Man - I am wary -
I fear that He is Grand -”
― Emily Dickinson

“...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.”
― Edna O'Brien, Girls in Their Married Bliss

“Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.”
― Edna O'Brien, Lantern Slides: Short Stories

“That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.”
― Edna O'Brien, Country Girl