Maria Pascual > Maria's Quotes

“Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, "Sal, God has arrived."
I looked. George Shearing. And as always he leaned his blind head on his pale hand, all ears opened like the ears of an elephant, listening to the American sounds and mastering them for his own English summer's-night use. Then they urged him to get up and play. He did. He played innumerable choruses with amazing chords that mounted higher and higher till the sweat splashed all over the piano and everybody listened in awe and fright. They led him off the stand after an hour. He went back to his dark corner, old God Shearing, and the boys said, "There ain't nothin left after that."
But the slender leader frowned. "Let's blow anyway."
Something would come of it yet. There's always more, a little further - it never ends. They sought to find new phrases after Shearing's explorations; they tried hard. They writhed and twisted and blew. Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men's souls to joy. They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned - and Dean sweated at the table and told them to go, go, go. At nine o'clock in the morning everybody - musicians, girls in slacks, bartenders, and the one little skinny, unhappy trombonist - staggered out of the club into the great roar of Chicago day to sleep until the wild bop night again.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's

“As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“This was really the way my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans

“Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I don't mean I'd mind being rich and famous. That's very much on my schedule, and someday I'll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I'd like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany's.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?"

"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.

"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"

"A pit full of fire."

"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?"

"No, sir."

"What must you do to avoid it?"

I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come was objectionable: "I must keep in good health and not die.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“La vida, perquè sigui vida, s'ha de viure a poc a poc...”
― Mercè Rodoreda, La plaça del Diamant

“Veure el món amb ulls d’infant, en un constant marevellament, no és pas ser beneit sinó tot el contrari.”
― Mercè Rodoreda, La plaça del Diamant

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Sure baby, mañana. It was always mañana. For the next few weeks that was all I heard––mañana a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
― Zora Neale Hurston

“It may be normal, darling; but I'd rather be natural.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“A casa vivíem sense paraules i les coses que jo duia per dintre em feien por perquè no sabia si eren meves...”
― Mercè Rodoreda, La plaça del Diamant

“Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation."
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“There's so few things men can talk about. If a man doesn't like baseball, then he must like horses, and if he doesn't like either of them, well, I'm in trouble anyway: he don't like girls.”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories