Ada > Ada's Quotes

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

“Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.”
― Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

“A house without books is like a room without windows.”
― Horace Mann

“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
― Franz Kafka

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”
― E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

“She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment. He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position; it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship.”
― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

“To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person.Raskolnikov had a terrible dream.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“So quietly flows the Seine that
one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great
artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me
itseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be
able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape.
Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear
negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they
need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time.
The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, the
changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.”
― Fran Lebowitz

“here was no way of knowing what path he would take from there, but in order to survive as a human being, he was sure to arrive at the fate of having to incur the dislike of other human beings. When that time came, he would probably clothe himself inconspicuously, so as not to attract attention, and beggarlike, linger about the market places of man, in search of something.”
― Sōseki Natsume, And Then

“According to his thinking, man was not born for a particular purpose. Quite the opposite: a purpose developed only with the birth of an individual. To objectively fabricate a purpose at the outset and to apply it to a human being was to rob him at birth of freedom of action. Hence, purpose was something that the individual had to make for himself. But no one, no matter who, could freely create a purpose. This was because the purpose of one's existence was as good as announced to the universe by the course of that existence itself.

Starting from this premise, Daisuke held that one's natural activities constituted one's natural purposes. A man walked because he wanted to. Then walking became his purpose. He thought because he wanted to. Then, thinking became his purpose. Just as to walk or to think for a particular purpose meant the degradation of walking and thinking, so to establish an external purpose and to act to fulfill it meant the degradation of action. Accordingly, those who used the sum of their actions as a means to an end were in effect destroying the purpose of their own existence.”
― Natsume Sōseki, And Then