Famous Quotes Ipsum

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. anger that things are the way they are. courage to make them the way they should be. advice is what we ask for when we know the answer but wish we didn't. in tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. for she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. she had read any number of them, from fielding to thomas mann. they not only offered her the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. it had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. it differentiated her from the others. the act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe. i am not quite sure how writing changes things, but i know that it does. it is indirect - like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. it is not always deliberate - like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets. but it does have an effect on the cosmos. before things are written down they don't exist in quite the same way. the act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded. poetry does not necessarily have to be beautiful to stick in the depths of our memory. personally, i would sooner have written alice in wonderland than the whole encyclopedia britannica. what is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from the biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult to come by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become not merely unspoken but unspeakable.... all silence has a meaning. it takes two to speak truth - one to speak and another to hear. truth indeed rather alleviates than hurts, and will always bear up against falsehood, as oil does above water. with our thoughts, we make the world. this is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. the heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night. the robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief. sex. in america it's an obsession; in other parts of the world, a fact. it's amazing the clarity that comes with psychotic jealousy. early in the novel that tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit tomas, anna meets vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. at the end of the novel, anna throws herself under a train. this symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite 'novelistic' to you, and i am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as 'fictive', 'fabricated', and 'untrue to life' into the word 'novelistic'. because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. we say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. it never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance. prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action. let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life. sure, the world is full of trouble. but as long as we have people undoing trouble, we have a pretty good world. two paths diverged in a wood, and i - i took the one less traveled by. and that has made all the difference. run for office? no. i've slept with too many women, i've done too many drugs, and i've been to too many parties. perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. when you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you. the universe is made of stories, not atoms..