Maria > Maria's Quotes

“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish, and short.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”
― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

“It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. ”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.”
― Nick Hornby

“my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.”
― Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down

“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"- Rob”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”
― Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch

“The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“Loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favor, but they quite clearly weren't. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn't worth the risk?”
― Nick Hornby, About a Boy

“I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.”
― Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
― Anais Nin

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anais Nin

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Anais Nin

“How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?”
― Anais Nin

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
― Anais Nin

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
― Anais Nin

“I am only responsible for my own heart, you offered yours up for the smashing my darling. Only a fool would give out such a vital organ”
― Anais Nin

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.”
― Anais Nin

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
― anaïs nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

“I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me. Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.”
― Anais Nin

“You don't find love, it finds you. It's got a little bit to do with destiny, fate, and what's written in the stars.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I do not want to be the leader. I refuse to be the leader. I want to live darkly and richly in my femaleness. I want a man lying over me, always over me. His will, his pleasure, his desire, his life, his work, his sexuality the touchstone, the command, my pivot. I don’t mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated. I don’t mind being told to stand on my own feet, not to cling, be all that I am capable of doing, but I am going to be pursued, fucked, possessed by the will of a male at his time, his bidding.”
― Anaïs Nin

“You cannot save people. You can only love them.”
― Anaïs Nin

“I will always be the virgin-prostitute, the perverse angel, the two-faced sinister and saintly woman.”
― Anais Nin, Henry & June