Alexandre Plennevaux > Alexandre's Quotes

“We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.”
― William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“Life is just action and reaction, rationalizations are added later on”
― Ibn-e-Safi

“You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.”
― Annie Proulx

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

“We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to get over it. What we have to get over, somehow we do. Even the worst things.”
― Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

“Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.”
― E. Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud

“Hunger is the best sauce in the world.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think--which is fundamentally a moral problem--must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“There seemed to be nothing left in the world, for I felt that Roland had taken with him all my future and Edward all my past.”
― Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“To understand all is to forgive all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“The past is always tense, the future perfect.”
― Zadie Smith

“You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible.”
― Deepak Chopra

“There are no wrong turnings. Only paths we had not known we were meant to walk.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, Tigana

“I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love...I sought what I might love, in love with loving.”
― Augustine of Hippo

“Every now and then I like to do as I'm told, just to confuse people.”
― Tamora Pierce, Melting Stones

“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“My goodness, no one gives a gift to Santa Claus!”
― Michael Brown

“You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

“Carpe diem' doesn't mean seize the day--it means something gentler and more sensible. 'Carpe diem' means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin servies. No R. Very different piece of advice. What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things--so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant--pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“You need the art in order to love the life.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch