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- What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. — Jack Kerouac, On the Road
- For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia… — Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. — Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions
- But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart. - Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
- We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity. — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
- I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
- Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward. — Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
- I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once. - John Greene, The Fault In Our Stars
- The air was full of thoughts and things to say. But at times like these, only the small things are ever said. The big things lurk unsaid inside. - Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
- It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty bumming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. — Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County
- At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow. - Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
- I asked her about life, and it was as if she rummaged around in a dusty chest to get me the answers. — Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
- Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting. — James M. Barrie, Peter Pan
- He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood. — Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into A Room
feb 6 2012 ∞
feb 21 2012 +
feb 21 2012 +