Browse 892 quotes about Book Quotes.
“Love the great narcotic was the revealer in the alchemist's bottle rendering visible the most untraceable substances.
Love the great narcotic was the agent provocateur exposing all the secret selves to daylight.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“When you're in my arms, I know you're mine. But your feet are so swift, so swift, they carry you as lightly as wings, I never know where, too fast, too fast away from me.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.)”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“The same books that kill us keep us alive.”
“Everything seems pointless since you left”
Source: Norwegian Wood
“I know, too, why she asked me not to forget her. Naoko herself knew, of course. She knew that my memories of her would fade. Which is precisely why she begged me never to forget her, to remember that she had existed.
The thought fills me with an almost unbearable sorrow. Because Naoko never loved me.”
Source: Norwegian Wood
“When you trust, you are tender and delicate, but when you doubt, you are dangerous and destructive”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“You are that to me, an oasis. You drug me and at the same time you give me strength.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“His entire body was pleading for reassurance, and if her whole love was not enough what else could she give him to cure his doubt?”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“And it is that which draws me to you, too, for you are the tropics, you have the sun in you, and the softness and the clarity...”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishes”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“So many broken promises, each day an aborted wish, a lost object, a misplaced unread book, cluttering the room like an attic with discarded possessions.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“The potion drunk by lovers is prepared by no one but themselves. The potion is the sum of one's whole existence.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“In this instant of danger they realized they were each other's reason for living, and into this instant they threw their whole being.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Every word spoken in the past accumulated forms and colors in the self. What flows through the veins besides blood is the distillation of every act committed, the sediment of all the visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. All the past emotions converge to tint the skin and flavor the lips, to regulate the pulse and produce crystals in the eyes.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“No man and woman know what will be born in the darkness of their intermingling; so much besides children, so many invisible births, exchanges of soul and character, blossoming of unknown selves, liberation of hidden treasures, buried fantasies...”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.”
Source: A Clockwork Orange
“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”
“But love, the great narcotic, was the hothouse in which all the selves burst into their fullest bloom...”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“The fascination exerted by one human being over another is not what he emits of his personality at the present instant of encounter but a summation of his entire being which gives off this powerful drug capturing the fancy and attachment.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Perhaps too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Men from the mountains always dream of the sea, and above all things I love to travel.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“What is odd is not that so many of the iconic news photos of the past, including some of the best-remembered pictures from the Second World War, appear to have been staged. It is that we are surprised to learn they were staged and always disappointed.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“No privacy left. No manners.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“No moment of charm without long roots in the past, no moment of charm is born on bare soil, a careless accident of beauty, but is the sum of great sorrows, growths, and efforts.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“I am sure you would not understand if I told you my father is delightfully clear and selfish, tender and lying, formal and incurable. He exhausts all the loves given to him. If I did not leave his house at night to warm myself in Rango's burning hands I would die at my task, arid and barren, sapless, while my father monologues about his past, and I yawn yawn yawn...”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“We" - this "we" is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through - don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Ali Baba protects the lovers! Gives them the luck of bandits, and no guilt, for love fills certain people and expands them beyond all laws; there is no time, no place for regrets, hesitations, cowardices. Love runs free and reckless, and all the gentle trickeries perpetrated to protect others from its burns-those who are not the lovers but who might be the victims of this love's expansion.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Out of worship and out of love he would let no one light the stove for her either, as if he would be the warmth and the fire to dry and warm her feet.”
“With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of an impure kind - like most historical evidence.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“In fact, there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding - at a distance, through the medium of photography - other people's pain.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“The memory of war, however, like all memory, is mostly local.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“I loved your breaking down that door, repeated Djuna. Through Rango she had breathed some other realm she had never attained before. She had touched through his act some climate of violence she had never known before.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Although I was so big, and so rough in many ways, loved hunting, fighting, horseback riding, I loved the piano above everything else...The mountain man's obsession is to get a glimpse of the sea.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Photographs that depict suffering shouldn't be beautiful, as captions shouldn't moralize.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Even a person like this makes mistakes, can't always hold on to everything they'd like to,can't always force the world to spin in the direction of their choosing. You'll hug him longer than necessary and tell him to keep in touch. And you'll know, finally, that it had nothing to do with you.”
Source: I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays
“Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it - say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken - or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.”
“Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one.”
Source: Regarding the Pain of Others
“Overhyped books are the empty calories of the literary world.”
“Every lover could be brought to trial as the murderer of his own love. When something hurts you, saddens you, I rush to avoid it, to alter it, to feel as you do, but you turn away with a gesture of impatience and say: "I don't understand”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Her presence had awakened in him a man suddenly whipped by his earlier ideals, whose lost manhood wanted to assert itself in action.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“Paul, Paul, this is the claim you never made, the fervor you never showed. You were so cool and light, so elusive, and I never felt you encircling me and claiming possession. Rango is saying all the words I wanted to hear you say. You never came close to me, even while taking me. You took me as men take foreign women in distant countries whose language they cannot speak. You took me in silence and strangeness.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“What can I say Rango? What can I do to prove to you that I belong to you?”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel
“These rituals Rango could not sustain, for he could not maintain the effort to arrive on time since his lifelong habit had created the opposite habit: to elude, to avoid, to disappoint every expectation of others, every commitment, every promise, every crystallization.”
Source: The Four-Chambered Heart: V3 in Nin's Continuous Novel