Quote collection
37 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In the years afterward, I fled whenever somebody began to understand me. That has subsided. But one thing remained: I don't want anybody to understand me completely. I want to go through life unknown. The blindness of others is my safety and my freedom."
"Kitsch is the most pernicious of all prisons. The bars are covered with the gold of simplistic, unreal feelings, so that you take them for the pillars of a palace."
"I love tunnels. They 're the symbol of hope: sometime it will be bright again. If by chance it is not night."
"To understand yourself: Is that a discovery or a creation?"
"Our lives are rivers, gliding free to that unfathomed, boundless sea, the silent grave!"
"What is it that we call loneliness. It can’t simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it?"
"'De nada,' replied Gregorius. The Portuguese couple sat down, the train went on. Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it had never stopped impressing him."
"Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else."
"Human beings can't bear silence.It would mean that they would bear themselves."
"I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it."
"When we talk about ourselves, about others, or simply about things, we want- it could be said – to reveal ourselves in our words: We want to show what we think and feel. We let other have a glimpse into our soul."
"What did i know of your fantasies? Why do we know so little about the fantasies of our parents? What do we know of somebody if we know nothing of the images passed to him by his imagination?"
"To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means."
"[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity."
"We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others"
"It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst. The worst is the humiliation."
"Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years."