Quiver > Quiver's Quotes

“Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“...memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Mary

“It’s said that the Buddha’s enlightenment is great than that of a traveler setting out, in the same proportion as the heavens are bigger than what can be seen of them through the eye of a needle. But in both cases, what you see is the sky.”
― Matthieu Ricard, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet

“At this season of the year, darkness is a more insistent thing than cold. The days are short as any dream.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White

“Something can be beautiful, if something else is ugly.
Someone can be good, if someone else is bad.”
― Lao Tzu

“How now, spirit! Whither wander you?”
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“They were villages forgotten in the depth of time, peopled by creatures chained forever to their tiny destinies.”
― Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

“All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.”
― E.B. White, Essays of E.B. White

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

“For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries—to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.”
― Ben Jonson

“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer.”
― E. M. Forster, Howards End

“Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare.”
― Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

“I shall become as complete a stranger as the unknown drama sleeping in the limbo of a novelist’s imagination”
― Léon Bloy, Disagreeable Tales

“One had, in any case, a bag full of fruits that resemble stars, picked by the handful in the luminous forest ...”
― Léon Bloy, Disagreeable Tales

“tomorrow is our permanent address”
― E.E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“love’s to giving as to keeping’s give;
as yes is to if,love is to yes”
― E.E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because”
― E.E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“Without a heart the animal
is very very kind
so kind it wouldn’t like a soul
and couldn’t use a mind.”
― E.E. Cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in fighting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in their fight with each other.”
― Franz Kafka

“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Ima istina kojima čovek pomaže da umru—reče ona—i sam čovek je istina koja umire.”
― Milorad Pavić, Poslednja ljubav u Carigradu. Unikat

“Tvoja misao je sveća kojom možeš da upališ tuđu sveću, no za to moraš imati vatre.”
― Milorad Pavić, Poslednja ljubav u Carigradu. Unikat

“If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.”
― Plato, Phaedrus