Famous Quotes Ipsum

It's kind of fun to do the impossible. for as long as i can remember, i had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. now i was in my own way; i myself was a dark object i could not ignore. i couldn't remember how to forget myself. i didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as i might, i couldn't avoid it. i was a boulder blocking my own path. i was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. so this was adolescence..... everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. the one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy. there is a certain kind of kid who is so in love with words that she kisses the pictures of authors on the jackets of books. i was one. all i ever wanted was to be a writer. though this yearning now seems like aspiring to be a blacksmith in the age of the automobile, my childhood image of what a writer did bestowed superhuman powers on the profession. a writer sat privately at her desk and made public things happen. the power was godlike. the sense of accomplishment had to be the same. making words slant across the page was like making rain. flowers grew in ink. hurricanes and revolutions were stirred up by the sound of pen scratching paper. mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves--that's the truth. we have two or three great moving experiences in our lives--experiences so great and moving that it doesn't seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before. i would rather be kicked with a foot than be overcome by a loud voice speaking cruel words. it's strange that words are so inadequate. yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. spending time is inevitable. you're going to spend your time doing something. it might as well be something you want to do. you must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. peace begins with a smile. it's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. i don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. i wish i believed, as j. b. priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! a "bad night" is not always a bad thing. be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you. a prudent question is one half of wisdom. people living deeply have no fear of death. 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. i pray because i can't help myself. i pray because i'm helpless. i pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. it doesn't change god, it changes me. true religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness. religion is a daughter of hope and fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable. can't say fairer than that. great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion. the difference between the possible and the impossible lies in a person's determination. give me a museum and i'll fill it. perfection is terrible; it cannot have children. moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting. i think of love, and you, and my heart grows full and warm, and my breath stands still..