Tiziana > Tiziana's Quotes

“Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man.”
― Ueda Akinari, Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”
― George Santayana

“But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness. ”
― Guy de Maupassant

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
― Richard Dawkins

“If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“It wasn't so much that I was afraid of the place itself, but I was afraid of the creatures who masqueraded as people.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Real World

“I'm this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Real World

“I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories

“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If I'm a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“Pain is easy to write. In pain we're all happily individual. But what can one write about happiness?”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“As long as one suffers one lives.”
― Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“I am. I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I . . . because . . . ugh!”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think… and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment - it's frightful - if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

“He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.”
― Lisa See, Peony in Love

“We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming - well, that’s like saying you can never change your fate.”
― Amy Tan, The Hundred Secret Senses

“Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“We are all resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption on a fifteen-year-old deathbed?”
― Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

“They stood there for a while, not saying anything. Then Eli said: 'Do you want to come in?'
Oskar didn't reply. Eli pulled on her T-shirt, lifted her hands, let them fall.
'I'm never going to hurt you.'
'I know that.'
'What are you thinking about?'
'That T-shirt. Is it from the trash room?'
'...yes.'
'Have you washed it?'
Eli didn't answer.
'You're a little gross, you know that?'
'I can change, if you like.'
'Good. Do that.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In