Olga > Olga's Quotes

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“The best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Никита сидел на стуле между двумя койками, обложенный конфетами и другими гостинцами, как могилка.”
― Алексей Сальников, Опосредованно

“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“I know only one thing. when i sleep, i know no fear, no, trouble no bliss. blessing on him who invented sleep. the common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. there is only one bad thing about sound sleep. they say it closely resembles death.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
― Winston Churchill

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”
― Tennessee Williams, Conversations With Tennessee Williams

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Every Ukrainian photographer dreams to take a photo which will stop the war.”
― Maks Levin

“So age after age — will it be soon, O Lord? —

Beneath the scalpel of nature and art,

Our spirit screams, our flesh depletes itself,

Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense.

("The Sixth Sense")”
― Nikolay S. Gumilev, Silver Age of Russian Culture

“Philosophy is an operation that of itself produces nothing; it operates on the basis of truths subtracted from the event.”
― Michael J. Kelly, Introducing Alain Badiou: A Graphic Guide

“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense

“Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There’s no way out.
–
You’ll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal’s rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.”
― Alexander Blok

“Man has to awaken to wonder - and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Боже мой, как я ненавижу все это - лавки, вещи за стеклом, тупое лицо товара и в особенности церемониал сделки, обмен приторными любезностями до и после! А эти опущенные ресницы скромной цены... благородство уступки... человеколюбие торговой рекламы... все это скверное подражание добру,- странно засасывающее добрых”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift

“Thus it transpired that even Berlin could be mysterious. Within the linden's bloom the streetlight winks. A dark and honeyed hush envelops us. Across the curb one's passing shadow slinks: across a stump a sable ripples thus. The night sky melts to peach beyond that gate. There water gleams, there Venice vaguely shows. Look at that street--it runs to China straight, and yonder star above the Volga glows! Oh, swear to me to put in dreams your trust, and to believe in fantasy alone, and never let your soul in prison rust, nor stretch your arm and say: a wall of stone.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift

“A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.”
― Elbert Hubbard

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“Everything that happens before Death is what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.”
― Anaïs Nin

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“[A]nd both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.”
― Albert Camus

“The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.”
― Marie Kondō, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“The more you are in suffering and difficulties and are “desperate” for God, the more He is going to come to your aid, reveal Who He is and show you the way to get out. This is why it is not spectacular things like miracles that we should look for. We know from the story of St. Nicetas related earlier that this is the worst possible approach and leads to deception. The right approach is found in the heart which tries to humble itself and simply knows that it is suffering, and that there somehow exists a higher truth which not only can help this suffering, but can bring it into a totally different dimension. This passing from suffering to transcendent reality reflects the life of Christ, Who went to His suffering on the Cross, endured the most horrible and shameful type of death, and then, totally to the consternation of His own disciples, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, sent His Holy Spirit and began the whole history of His Church.”
― Fr. Seraphim Rose, God's Revelation to the Human Heart