u > u's Quotes

“You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

“I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

“I love you because you didn't fall in love with me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Not seeing people permits us to imagine them with every perfection.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth, and complicates with human fatality a destiny that is divine; so long as the three problems of the century - the degradation of man by the exploitation of his labour, the ruin of women by starvation and the atrophy of childhood by physical and spiritual night are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words and from a still broader point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“As he soars, he thinks, suddenly, of Dr. Kashen. Or not of Dr. Kashen, necessarily, but the question he had asked him when he was applying to be his advisee: What's your favorite axiom? (The nerd pickup line, CM had once called it.)

"The axiom of equality," he'd said, and Kashen had nodded, approvingly. "That's a good one," he'd said.

The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are the words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality––Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom––but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. I was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.

But now he knows for certain how true the axiom is, because he himself––his very life––has proven it. The person I was will always be the person I am, he realizes. The context may have changed: he may be in this apartment, and he may have a job that he enjoys and that pays him well, and he may have parents and friends he loves. He may be respected; in court, he may even be feared. But fundamentally, he is the same person, a person who inspires disgust, a person meant to be hated. And in that microsecond that he finds himself suspended in the air, between ecstasy of being aloft and the anticipation of his landing, which he knows will be terrible, he knows that x will always equal x, no matter what he does, or how many years he moves away from the monastery, from Brother Luke, no matter how much he earns or how hard he tries to forget. It is the last thing he thinks as his shoulder cracks down upon the concrete, and the world, for an instant, jerks blessedly away from beneath him: x = x, he thinks. x = x, x = x.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“You never believed in the meaning of this world, and you therefore deduced the idea that everything was equivalent and that good and evil could be defined according to one's wishes. You supposed that in the absence of any human or divine code the only values were those of the animal world—in other words, violence and cunning. Hence you concluded that man was negligible and that his soul could be killed, that in the maddest of histories the only pursuit for the individual was the adventure of power and his own morality, the realism of conquests.”
― Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays

“I poured my soul into the dust by loving a man who was soon to die, as if he would live forever.”
― Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine: Books I-X

“Not for you,” Lila replies ardently, “you’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“The dreamer—if you want an exact definition—is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort. For the most part he settles in some inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail, or, anyway, he is in that respect very much like that remarkable creature, which is an animal and a house both at once, and is called a tortoise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Even if I tried to tell myself that I had given him nothing, that the children were mostly mine, that they had remained within the radius of my body, subject to my care, still I couldn't avoid thinking what aspects of his nature inevitably lay hidden in them. Mario would explode suddenly from inside their bones, now, over the days, over the years, in ways that were more and more visible. How much of him would I be forced to love forever, without even realizing it, simply by virtue of the fact that I loved them? What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn't die, it doesn't want to die.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“What did it profit that I read the greatest human ideas of the so-called “liberal arts” in the books I got hold of. My thinking was enslaved to corrupt desires, so what difference did it make that I could read and understand these books? I delighted in learning, but I had no divine context for what my mind picked up. I had no foundation to discern what is true or certain. I was standing with my back to the light, so that the things that should be illuminated were in shadow, even though they were in front of my face.”
― Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of St. Augustine: Modern English Version

“You think that you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something, you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you.... I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.”
― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Is it true that you don’t love me anymore?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?”
“No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.”
“And then?”
“I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.”
“It was.”
“No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“A woman's body does a thousand different things, toils, runs, studies, fantasizes, invents, wearies, and meanwhile the breasts enlarge, the lips of the sex swell, the flesh throbs with a round life that is yours, your life, and yet pushes elsewhere, draws away from you although it inhabits your belly, joyful and weighty, felt as a greedy impulse and yet repellent, like an insect's poison injected into a vein.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

“You know how children are, sometimes they love you by cuddling you, other times by trying to remake you from the start, reinvent you, as if they thought you were badly brought up and they had to teach you how to get on in the world, what music to listen to, what books to read, what films to see, the words you should use and those you shouldn’t because they’re old now, no one says that anymore.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter

“We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“Mario, I wrote, to give myself courage, had not taken away the world, he had taken away only himself. And you are not a woman of thirty years ago. You are of today, take hold of today, don't regress, don't lose yourself, keep a tight grip. Above all, don't give into distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He's gone, you're still here. You'll no longer enjoy the gleam of his eyes, of his words, but so what? Organize your defenses, preserve your wholeness, don't let yourself break like an ornament, you're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit. My job, I thought, is to demonstrate that one can remain healthy. Demonstrate it to myself, no one else. If I am exposed to lizards, I will fight the lizards. If I am exposed to ants, I will fight the ants. If I am exposed to thieves, I will fight the thieves. If I am exposed to myself, I will fight myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“...the elegant jump from malicious gossip to compliment, seemed to me so very successful that I thought of adult normality precisely as an art of that type.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I would not make a spectacle of myself.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

“I'm dead, but I'm fine.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Lost Daughter