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Quotations I have stumbled across from my reading and from life, updated daily, unless I'm without internet access or the time for it.
(I'm off to college later this year! Please excuse my occasional inactivity.)
Feel free to check out my main blog too!
"Maybe our favourite quotations say more about us than about the stories and people we’re quoting."
— John Green
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver, Invisible Cities
Desires are already memories.
Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver, Invisible Cities
When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.
Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver, Invisible Cities
I used to think that I could never lose someone if I photographed them enough. I used photography to stave off loss. But with the recent deaths of so many of my friends I’ve realized the limits of what can be preserved.
Jan Goldin
I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.
Brian Andreas, Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas
We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.
André Berthiaume, Contretemps
He was as much himself again as he ever would be, and yet that “self” would never be the same again for now he knew the meaning of fear as it defines itself in its most violent form, that is, fear of the death of the beloved, of the loss of the beloved, of the loss of love. It was the beginning of an anxiety that would never end, except with the deaths of either or both; and anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence.
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
Brady: There used to be a mutuality of understanding and admiration. Why is it, my old friend, that you have moved so far away from me?
Drummond: Well, all motion is relative, Matt. Perhaps it is you who have moved away by standing still.
Drummond: Well, all motion is relative, Matt. Perhaps it is you who have moved away by standing still.
Jeremy Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind
His eyes were large and rather liquid; sad and contemplative. But whenever he looked at someone, they seemed to burn bright. A light came from them, a light that appeared to pierce your body, seeing something beyond you, into your heart. Not a man knew what the language the eyes spoke. Only, if the boy gazed at you, you had to obey.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, The River Between
Painfully probing in the dark, I grope toward
The void of the twilight with the point of my faltering
Cane — I for whom Paradise was always a metaphor,
An image of libraries.
The void of the twilight with the point of my faltering
Cane — I for whom Paradise was always a metaphor,
An image of libraries.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Poem of the Gifts”
[I]s not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same.
Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
[Love is t]he deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.
Lauren Oliver, Delirium
