Nicholas Andriani > Nicholas's Quotes

“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Семейное счастие

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Min kamp 1

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
― Tove Jansson

“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“You can't ever be really free if you admire somebody too much.”
― Tove Jansson, Tales from Moominvalley

“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven't said anything. The border is to be on the way. It is the way that is the most important thing.”
― Tove Jansson

“I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“And this is the simple truth--that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

“Solitude was a compulsory feature of Kafka’s writing process. “Being alone has a power over me that never fails,” he once wrote in his diary. “My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper.”6”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality,” he wrote in “Why I Write.” Surely the pseudonym played some role in that effacement.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The rough draft is always a ghastly mess bearing little relation to the finished result, but all the same it is the main part of job,”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“She tended to latch on to writers who fell into one of two categories: those who simply wrote beautifully, and those who challenged the rules of fiction or other conventions in ways that appealed to her own goals to experiment with words through fiction and to use fiction to probe consciousness—conventional plot was never a primary component of her work. But it was the act of reading itself, more than any one or two or seven writers, that influenced Woolf, as a daily exercise in intellectual stimulation and as a means of revving the engine for her own work.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“A DAY IN THE WRITER’S LIFE . . . Virginia Woolf awoke early every morning, either at her home in London or the country house in Sussex, and breakfasted with her husband. Around 9:30 a.m., they both retreated to their respective writing rooms, hers an explosion of muddle—books, papers, odds and ends—where, assuming she was well, Woolf would sit in her armchair, plywood board on her lap, to work on her latest piece of fiction until 12:30 or 1 p.m., when she would break for lunch. In the afternoon, she would almost always take a walk, write in her diary, or work on an essay. Teatime came in the late afternoon. Then, before dinner, she would sometimes make revisions, sometimes read, or sometimes even see friends. The nighttime hours were for reading or socializing—her mind, she claimed, was no longer fit for writing after the sun went down.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Place does not matter much, it is the relationship between the brain and the hand that poses some odd problems,” Nabokov once wrote.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Salman Rushdie the man on the scene; Salman Rushdie, dater of models and hobnobber with the glitterati. If these personas are indeed part of the larger truth—and Rushdie does little to dispel the myths surrounding them—then they coexist in harmony with the man who approaches writing as a very serious endeavor, undertaken in quiet solitude.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“Rushdie then writes for four hours or so, during which he might write two to four pages319—over the years, he’s learned that beyond that chunk of time, the output becomes mush.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“On Valentine’s Day 1989, the prosaic customs of Rushdie’s daily routine were interrupted in a way that most writers can hardly imagine. On that day, the Iranian ayatollah issued a call for his death for alleged crimes against Islam committed by writing The Satanic Verses. Rushdie immediately went into hiding under the protection of the British government, and was clandestinely relocated to at least thirty different houses and flats over the following few years.”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“When you’re writing a novel,” he says, “it’s so easy to have odd bits of laziness slip in. Poetry is a way of reminding myself to pay attention to language”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one’s intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young—a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?”
― Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

“(In one of the great ironies of literary history, Kerouac went to his grave having never learned to drive.)”
― Sarah Stodola, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

“This began to get interesting. The situation ran away with me, and one lie after another engendered in my head. I sat down again, forgot the newspaper, and the remarkable documents, grew lively, and cut short the old fellow's talk. The little goblin's unsuspecting simplicity made me foolhardy; I would stuff him recklessly full of lies; rout him out o' field grandly, and stop his mouth from sheer amazement. Had he heard of the electric psalm-book that Happolati had invented?”
― Knut Hamsun, The Best of Knut Hamsun: Boxed Set

“If you are unable to find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?”
― Dogen

“When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“An intense, peculiar exhalation of light and colour emanates from these fantasies of mine. I start with surprise as I note one good thing after another, and tell myself that this is the best thing I have ever read. My head swims with a sense of satisfaction; delight inflates me; I grow grandiose.”
― Knut Hamsun, The Best of Knut Hamsun: Boxed Set