kiana > kiana's Quotes

“He feels her teeth, takes her tongue. Carmen, Carmen, Carmen, Carmen. In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“I was sixteen, wild, errant, in the afterglow of a love affair that felt as if it had defined everything in my life.”
― Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory

“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“We're too old for falling in love with the idea of love. When you're a grown-up, love means being attracted to someone and wanting to be near them, reading and decoding the signs and scents the other gives off, communicating with someone, and sounding out how the other feels. That's what I would've told you, with a laugh. But you won't hear me laughing anymore. Foolish love. Love that makes you go numb, that paralyzes you, that doubles you over like a wounded animal.”
― Hiromi Kawakami, The Ten Loves of Mr. Nishino

“How could I have nothing to read? Perhaps it wasn't a lack of a book but a lack of obsession.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“I visited her more than I had the grave of my own mother. But I don't feel my mother there; she is with me where I am; in my daughter's smile, in the whispers that soothe me when I'm off track.”
― Patti Smith

“Ah, how cautiously a man should breathe
near those who see not only what we do,
but have the sense which reads the mind beneath”
― Dante Alighieri

“The Italian spring comes early, and the first warm days would normally occur under Aquarius.”
― John Ciardi, The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“You don’t have a home until you leave it and then, when you have left it, you never can go back.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But, again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“We had been on the verge of loving one another. But, incapable of doing so, we found ourselves on the precipice, doomed to remain there forever.”
― Hiromi Kawakami

“she is the noor of my eyes and the sultan of my heart.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“At times, he didn't understand the meaning of the Koran's words. But he said he liked the enhancing sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart. "They'll comfort you to . Mariam jo," he said. "You can summon then in your time of your need, and they won't fail you. God's words will never betray you, my girl.”
― Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

“At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along with their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. The old joke, that two Iranian men could never get on an elevator because they’ll just keep saying “you go,” “no you,” “no no please,” “I insist,” as the doors opened and closed. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Cyrus also worried that the whole idea of gratitude was possibly classist, or worse. Did a poor Syrian child, whose living and dying had been indelibly shaped by the murderous whims of evil men, qualify for grace only if she possessed a superhuman ability to look beyond her hardship and notice the beauty of a single flower growing through a pile of rubble? And would the gratitude for that flower be contaminated by the awareness, or ignorance, of the bodies turning to soil beneath it?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I’ve read your poems, Cyrus. I get that you’re Persian. Born there, raised here. I know that’s a part of you. But you’ve probably spent more time looking at your phone today, just today, than you’ve spent cutting open pomegranates in your entire life. Cumulatively. Right? But how many fucking pomegranates are in your poems? Versus how many iPhones? Do you see what I mean?”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“I was so scared of being hurt that I'd done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I choose nothing. I did nothing.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“He broke my heart. You merely broke my life.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I were to spend the rest of my life in supplication, seeking forgiveness for having murdered her memory. For the greatest betrayal, the greatest sin we can commit against the blameless is to abandon a loving heart.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat: “By Sabahattin Ali”

“Everywhere I went, I would be looking for her. In every pair of eyes I would be searching for the Madonna in a fur coat. I knew from the outset that I would never find her. Yet it was not in my power to give up searching. She had condemned me to a lifelong quest for a cipher for someone that did not exist. She should never have done this to me”
― Ali Sabahatin, Madona u bundi

“Having never known such intimacy before, I was desperate to protect it. And perhaps what I desired most was to possess her wholly and absolutely, body and soul, but I was so fearful of losing what I already had that I did not dare look away from it. I was, in effect, watching the most beautiful bird in all creation and keeping perfectly still for fear of frightening it away with a sudden movement.”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat