Walter Neto > Walter's Quotes

“Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You’ve got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

“But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”
― Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

“Some day, my son, you are going to learn that the two greatest joys of being a man are beating the hell out of someone and getting the hell beaten out of you, good night.”
― Richard Price, I Wanderers

“This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping.”
― Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction

“His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, and they shall live, and he in them still green.”
― William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“But what am I going to see?

I don't know. In a certain sense, it depends on you.”
― Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

“When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you...when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.”
― Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985

“The dead cannot call out to us. All they can do is wait for us to call to them. Except for the dead whose names are unknown. Uncalled by anyone, they sink ever deeper into solitude.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“But the result is that I’m able to get in touch with my life indirectly through someone else’s. And I’m able to think about the things that I need to think about. There’s no way for me to do this directly. My body rejects it every time I try. That’s why I said it’s sort of like reading a novel. No one can deal with their suffering on their own. We all seek someone else to be the conduit for our emotions.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“When he left the store, she said thank you for the second time and, with her eyes on his back as he walked away, inexplicably sensed a life teeming with stories that needed to be told.”
― Keiichirō Hirano, A Man

“I wonder why people work so hard to become politicians just in order to do something wrong.”
― Masuji Ibuse, Lieutenant Lookeast, and other stories;

“A writer who writes, ''I am alone''... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes.”
― Maurice Blanchot

“Could these wonderful inventions have never been created without first going down the road of armaments and warfare? Was it acceptable that we scholars accepted this as fate—as ‘civilization’s capitalism—the unavoidable state of the utilitarian stage,’ and simply cast our hopes on the future?”
― Sakyo Komatsu, Virus: The Day of Resurrection