The Blue Flower Quotes

“A word of advice. If, as a young man, student, you are tormented by a desire for women, it is best to get out into the fresh air as much as possible.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“He said, aloud, 'The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. The way leads inward, always inwards.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: A Novel

“But time giving to wishing for what can't be is not only spent, but wasted, and for all that we waste we shall be accountable.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“Opportunity, after all, is only another word for temptation.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“Algebra, like laudanum, deadens pain, Fritz wrote.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“The Freifrau, meanwhile, struggled with the demon of timidity.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“But there is something else which I have written and which I want to read to you while I still have time,’ Fritz told Karoline. ‘It will not truly exist until you have heard it.’ ‘Is”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: A Novel

“think, indeed, that women have a better grasp on the whole business of life than we men have. We are morally better than they are, but they can reach perfection, we can’t. And that is in spite of the fact that they particularise, we generalise.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: A Novel

“Luck has its rules, if you can understand them, and then it is scarcely luck.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: A Novel

“Sink, he told his hopes, with a kind of satisfaction, sink like a corpse dropped into the river. I am rejected, not for being unwelcome, not even for being ridiculous, but for being nothing.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“. . . in every created thing, whether it is alive or whether is what we usually call inanimate, there is an attempt to communicate, even among the totally silent. There is a question being asked, a different question for every entity, which for the most part will never be put into words, even by those who can speak.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“Llevar una oficina no es tan difícil, le dijo Just. Básicamente consiste en saber, en primer lugar, que entra; en segundo lugar, qué queda pendiente; en tercer lugar, qué asuntos han sido gestionados y están listos para salir; y en cuarto lugar, qué es lo que ya ha salido. Todos los asuntos deben encontrarse en una de estas cuatro etapas, y de este modo no se puede poner la excusa de que se ha traspapelado algún documento. Para cada transacción debe haber un registro, y de ese registro tienes que poder obtener inmediatamente una copia escrita. El mundo civilizado no podria existir sin su cohorte de escribientes, y estos a su vez no podrían existir si la civilización no requiriese tanto papeleo.
- Yo no resistiria la vida si tuviera que que trabajar de escribiente, le dijo Fritz. - No debería existir ese tipo de trabajo.
- Ni una revolución acabaría con él, le dijo Coelestin Just. - Habría escribientes al pie de la guillotina.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“En ese momento se dio la vuelta, como movida por una ráfaga de viento.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower

“But he also saw himself as a geognost, a natural scientist, who, as he put it, had come ‘to an entirely new land, and dark stars’. The mining industry, it seemed to him, was not a science, but an art.”
― Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower: A Novel