“He knew me through and through. It infuriated me that he knew me so thoroughly.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
quotes
“To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.” — Donna Tartt, The Secret History
“The heart grows brutal from feeding on fantasies.” – Robert Pinsky, “In Defense of Allusion”
“Youth is the only sexy tragedy.” – Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall.
“Let it pass; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Sensible Thing.
“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?” ― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping.
“This is how we know the world: hit something hard, hit something soft, sit by a glowing window and watch the lighted storm swim by.” – Lisa Olstein, “Leopards Are Flexible Cats.”
“If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it.” ― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name.
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.” ― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun.
“I am the shape you made me.
Filth teaches filth.”
— Sophocles, Electra (tranlated by Anne Carson)