Jools > Jools's Quotes

“Cosí una dolce malinconia ti prende, la melanconia dell'autunno, e sotto un larice, all'asciutto, cerchi anche tu un luogo dove asciugarti per meditare sulle stagioni della vita e sull'esistenza che corre via con i ricordi che diventano preghiera di ringraziamento per la vita che hai avuto e per i doni che la natura ti elargisce.
Una mattina di dicembre vedrai il cielo uniformemente grigio, le montagne dentro le nuvole, i boschi più scuri e, da una catasta di legna, schizzar via lo scricciolo. Il suo campanellino d'argento ti dirà prossima la prima neve.”
― Mario Rigoni Stern, Stagioni

“Siamo creature in ricerca perenne di significati, che devono venire a patti con il fatto di essere scagliate in un universo che, intrinsecamente, è privo di significato.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy – A Therapist's Clinical Stories of Memorable Patients and Transformation

“Se c'è una via verso il Meglio, essa necessita di uno sguardo intenso al Peggio.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Momma and the Meaning of Life: Tales of Psychotherapy – A Therapist's Clinical Stories of Memorable Patients and Transformation

“Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“How do I feel?' he cried. ' Well, I don't know how to say it. I feel, I feel' – he waved his arms in the air – 'I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!' He stopped and he turned towards his master.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“His fingers touched the strings and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I go to church, Father,” she replied. “Anna Ivanovna is not my mother, nor is her madness my business. Just as my soul is not yours. And it seems to me we did very well before you came; for if we prayed less, we also wept less.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“Morozko shot the fire a glance and it leaped up, roaring. Vasya gratefully sank down onto her heap of boughs and warmed her hands.
"Will you teach me to do magic, too?" she asked him. "To make fire with my eyes?"
The fire flared sudden and harsh on the bones of Morozko's face. "There is no such things as magic"
"But you just —"
"Things are or they are not, Vasya," he interrupted. "If you want something, it means you do not have it, it means you do not believe it is there, which means that it will never be there. The fire is or it is not. That which you call magic is simply not allowing the world to be other than as you will it.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower

“I cannot make speeches, Emma:”—he soon resumed, and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“They should remember it everyday, when they look into their smiling faces, and be thankful that their bones are not scattered in a Cretan dungeon."
"Oh, of course they should", I hastened to agree. "But you know what people are like..."
His brows few together, confused. "What do you mean?"
"Well, they forget what could have been and focus only on the irritations of today.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“Was this my punishment? To live the reality of my dream and find out that its glittering beauty faded to nothing when stepped close?”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“There was an immense weight on his chest. An eternity of water lay above him, pushing down, breaking his body and grinding his bones. He had never been so cold. He felt the nibbling of a thousand tiny teeth. A sucking blackness stretched in every dimension.”
― Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni

“Writing was entering into fog, feeling my way for a route from this world to the unearthly world of words, a route easier to find on some day that others. Lurking on my shoulder as I stumbled was the parrot of a question, asking me how I lived and he died.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees

“Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" I asked.
Over the line, in the silence, the static hissed.
"You aren't afraid of the things you believe in," he said. This, too, I wrote in his memoir, even though I had not understood what he meant.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees

“It was a trivial secret, but one I would remember as vividly as my feeling that while some people are haunted by the dead, others are haunted by the living.”
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees

“One evening, camped at the edge of a deep wood, Tristran heard something he had never heard before: a beautiful melody, plangent and strange. It filled his head with awe and delight. The music made him think of spaces without limits, of huge crystalline spheres which revolved with unutterable slowness through the vasty halls of the air. The melody transported him, took him beyond himself.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“One of our issues as adults is that we become too focused on the results of an activity. We work to earn money. We go to the gym to lose weight. We spend time with people to network and further our careers. What happened to doing something just because it’s fun?”
― Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living

“I did not know what to do when adults cried. It was something I had only seen twice before in my life: I had seen my grandparents cry, when my aunt had died, in hospital, and I had seen my mother cry. Adults should not weep, I knew. They did not have mothers who would comfort them.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I said, “Will she be the same?”
The old woman guffawed, as if I had said the funniest thing in the universe. “Nothing’s ever the same,” she said. “Be it a second later or a hundred years. It’s always churning and roiling. And people change as much as oceans.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Affection must be cultivated, Camilo; it has to be watered and tended like a plant, but we’d let ours dry up.”
― Isabel Allende, Violeta

“It’s true that I feel content and curious, but sometimes I’m also frightened. Waiting on the Other Side may be total desolation, eternal wandering of the sidereal plane calling out for help over and over. No. It won’t be like that. There will be light, a lot of light. My moments of uncertainty are very brief. Life pulls me back in and it’s hard for me to leave it behind.”
― Isabel Allende, Violeta

“Relax, Victor. Going around in a sulk will get you nowhere. Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.”
― Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

“Usually before a dream becomes reality, we tend to think we’ll wish for nothing else if only the dream is realised. Imagine how you’d feel if you always remembered that your dream has already been fulfilled. Everything that comes after would be like a lovely bonus.”
― Baek Se-hee, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki

“Sometimes my grief feels as though I’ve been left alone in a room with no doors. Every time I remember that my mother is dead, it feels like I’m colliding with a wall that won’t give. There’s no escape, just a hard surface that I keep ramming into over and over, a reminder of the immutable reality that I will never see her again.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“When these early people looked at a stone, they did not see an inert, unpromising rock. It embodied strength, permanence, solidity and an absolute mode of being that was quite different from the vulnerable human state. Its very otherness made it holy.”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“Or one might take the tip of a pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: The pencil-tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become leagues, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
[...]
“Perhaps you saw what place our universe plays in the scheme of things—as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our own universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it’s already begun to happen. We say the world has moved on; maybe we really mean that it has begun to dry up.”
― Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“I am only a country girl,” said Vasya. She reached again into the blackberry bush, wary of thorns. “I have never seen Tsargrad, or angels, or heard the voice of God. But I think you should be careful, Batyushka, that God does not speak in the voice of your own wishing. We have never needed saving before.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“Perhaps I am not so wise as you would have me, for all my years in this world. I do not know what you should choose. Every time you take one path, you must live with the memory of the other: of a life left unchosen. Decide as seems best, one course or the other; each way will have its bitter with its sweet.”
“That is not advice,” she said. The wind blew her hair against his face.
“It is all I have,” he said.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower