Ditza > Ditza's Quotes

“Spomenik herojima Černobilja... To je rukotvoreni sarkofag, u koji su pohranili nuklearni plamen. Piramida dvadesetog veka.”
― Svetlana Aleksijevič

“Literature is the best thing humanity has. Poetry is the heart of literature, the highest concentration of everything that is the best in the world and in man. It is the only true food for your soul”
― Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Зеленый шатер

“February
Boris Pasternak

It's February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it, sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.

Six grivnas* for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where drizzles fall
Louder than any ink or tears

Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.

A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.

*Grivna: a unit of currency.”
― Boris Pasternak

“Poručnik Vaculić, star dvadeset i tri godine, govorio je: "Naš život stvarno je prošao najbolje što je mogao!”
― Bora Ćosić, Priče o zanatima / Uloga moje porodice u svetskoj revoluciji

“The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
― Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari

“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves... And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych

“Radost
je pitomo srce ove metalne životinje.
(pjesma Bicikl)”
― Olja Savičević Ivančević, Mamasafari

“Trebalo bi dati
Nobela
onome
koji je izmislio
trešnju”
― Semezdin Mehmedinović, Knjiga prozora

“You can't understand beauty without peace of mind and you can't get close to the truth without fear.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“...I believe in dreams more than I believe in God. Dreams get into you and leave, then come back with new fruit, but God is just a vast desert.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Iraqi Christ

“Spilled blood and superstition are the basis of the world. Man is not the only creature who kills for bread, or love, or power, because animals in the jungle do that in various ways, but he is the only creature who kills because of faith.”
― Hassan Blasim, The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq

“Deda me je opomenuo: „Ti nikada nećeš da odrasteš!“ Ja sam mu odgovorio: „Šta mogu!“ Mama me je branila: „On nema vremena za to!“ Ja sam stalno pokušavao da odrastem kao i ostali ljudi, ali se odmah desilo nešto novo i mi smo ponovo ostali ono što smo bili.”
― Bora Ćosić, My Family's Role in the World Revolution: and Other Prose

“Nije li čudno što se ljudi tako rado bore za svoju vjeru, a tako nerado žive po njenim zakonima.”
― Marija Jurić Zagorka, Grička vještica I - VII

“Books. Cats. Life is Good.”
― Edward Gorey

“The helpful thought for which you look
Is written somewhere in a book.”
― Edward Gorey

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.”
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

“A što se tiče drveća, ja sam imao u Rimu jednu, „svoju“, piniju, koju sam mogao da vidim i sa svojih prozora. Ona stoji u vrtu, na Pinču, tačno iznad poprsja Šatobrijana. Nisam ja nju voleo sa tog razloga, nego zato, što je i leti, i zimi, tako zelena, da se iz daleka čini crna. Skoro svake nedelje, uzimam ulaznicu za taj park i idem da sedim tamo, posle „Bebingtona“, pre odlaska na posao. Zazvonim na kapiju, puste me unutra, a ta pinija me čeka i, pod njom, moji rukopisi iz Skandinavije, koje prepisujem u knjigu. Tu, na klupi, sedim, mirno, kao da sam pred starom komandom mesta, u Tronjemu.”
― Miloš Crnjanski, Kod Hiperborejaca I

“Čovek koji manje živi, a više misli, postaje sve hladniji i, kao neki kristal, tvrđi. Postaje irealan. Propušta svetlost i ona se u njemu lomi kao u nekoj prizmi.

A poneki pesnik od toga poludi.”
― Miloš Crnjanski, Kod Hiperborejaca I

“Provided the gods of Rome are given their due, it doesn't really matter to them whether their worshippers believe in them or not. Having taken part in the official rituals, a citizen is free to worship whatever other deities he pleases. Rom'es gods are there to be obeyed and respected, not loved, and they no more mind sacrifices to other deities than the taxman minds people paying other dues elsewhere. Dealing with the gods is an exchange of duties and mutual respect. Confessing a deep love for a particular god is superstitio and the person concerned is probably emotionally concerned.”
― Philip Matyszak, Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day

“S onima koji ne umru slučajno stvari stoje ovako: prerezanih žila umiru žene i homoseksualci, metak u glavu ispale vojnici i grubijani, tabletama se dokrajče glumci i romantičari, u srce pucaju nespretnjakovići i neurotici, vješaju se neobaviješteni i perverznjaci, s mostova skaču slavohlepni i slabići, s krovova i visokih katova skaču očajnici i teoretičari.”
― Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro

“...insofar as an American thinks that the sex he or she is having is an intimate, private thing constructed within a space governed by personal consent, she or he is having straight sex, straight sex authorized by national culture; she or he is practicing national heterosexuality...”
― Lauren Berlant

“How long have people thought about the present as having weight, as being a thing disconnected from other things, as an obstacle to living?”
― Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

“And above all, I will argue the necessity for preserving, against all shame, a demanding question of revolution itself, a question about utopia that keeps pushing its way through a field of failed aspirations, like a student at the back of the room who gets suddenly, violently, tired of being invisible.”
― Lauren Berlant