Jitse > Jitse's Quotes

“Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion - you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.”
― Lydia Davis, Essays One

“I sat beside Charlie. Opposite us, in the Black Maria, was a red-haired boy of my own age, and a small man with a broken nose, a cauliflower ear, and a begrudging look. He was going up for kicking his wife. He was not unfriendly, and told me his name was Donohoe. I said that by a coincidence that was my mother’s name. It was not her name, but civility costs nothing.”
― Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy

“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

“I was superstitious. Today was a Monday. I was born on Monday. It was a good day to arrive in New York City. No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“All horsepower corrupts.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant to captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter. An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation - or the
"so-called conversation" as Niki would put it - sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast, and with the anecdote next in line tugging at their attention.”
― Ia Genberg, Detaljerna

“Our world, seemingly global, is in reality a planet of thousands of the most varied and never intersecting provinces. A trip around the world is a journey from backwater to backwater, each of which considers itself, in its isolation, a shining star. For most people, the real world ends on the threshold of their house, at the edge of their village, or, at the very most, on the border of their valley. That, which is beyond is unreal, unimportant, and even useless, whereas that which we have at our fingertips, in our field of vision, expands until it seems an entire universe, overshadowing all else. Often, the native and the newcomer have difficulty finding a common language, because each looks at the same place through a different lens. The newcomer has a wide-angle lens, which gives him a distant diminished view, although with a long horizon line, while the local always employs a telescopic lens that magnifies the slightest detail.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, The Shadow of the Sun