Ashwin > Ashwin's Quotes

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can��t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“alone with everybody


the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and them men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but they keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there's no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.”
― Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell

“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world��s existence. All these half-tones of the soul��s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa

“The other day in connection with my uncle��s letter you asked me about my plans and prospects. I was amazed by your question, and am now reminded of it again by this stranger��s question. Needless to say I have no plans, no prospects; I cannot step into the future; I can crash into the future, grind into the future, stumble into the future, this I can do; but best of all I can lie still. Plans and prospects, however��honestly, I have none; when things go well, I am entirely absorbed by the present; when things go badly, I curse even the present, let alone the future!

-Franz”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“I shut myself in because I'm lonely. Because I don't want to face any more loneliness, I shut myself away. [...] I'm greedier than anyone. I don't want some half-assed happiness. I don't need some partial warmth. I want a happiness that goes on forever. That's impossible, though! I don't know why it is, but in this world, some interference is sure to come. Important things break right away. I've been alive for twenty-two years, and I know at least this much. It doesn't matter what the thing is, but it will break. That's why, from the beginning, it's better not to need anything.”
― Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.

“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“I believe those three days,

compared to the tragic thirty years I would have lived,

compared to the worthwhile thirty days I would have lived,

were of much, much more value.”
― Sugaru Miaki, �����g���Ҹ�

“And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees. . . .”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“I sometimes have moments of such despair, such despair �� Because in those moments I start to think that I will never be capable of beginning to live a real life; because I have already begun to think that I have lost all sense of proportion, all sense of the real and the actual; because, what is more, I have cursed myself; because my nights of fantasy are followed by hideous moments of sobering! And all the time one hears the human crowd swirling and thundering around one in the whirlwind of life, one hears, one sees how people live��that they live in reality, that for them life is not something forbidden, that their lives are not scattered for the winds like dreams or visions but are forever in the process of renewal, forever young, and that no two moments in them are ever the same; while how dreary and monotonous to the point of being vulgar is timorous fantasy, the slave of shadow, of the idea...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can��t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can��t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it��s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Daru felt a sudden wrath against the man, against all men with their rotten spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust.”
― Albert Camus, The Guest

“Before her the stars were falling one by one and being snuffed out among the stones of the desert, and each time Janine opened a little more to the night. Breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the dead weight of others, the craziness or stuffiness of life, the long anguish of living and dying. After so many years of mad, aimless fleeing from fear, she had come to a stop at last.”
― Albert Camus, The Adulterous Woman

“And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilised man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.”
― Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Little Dog

“These words, so ordinary, for some reason moved Gurov to indignation, and struck him as degrading and unclean. What savage manners, what people! What senseless nights, what uninteresting, uneventful days! The rage for card-playing, the gluttony, the drunkenness, the continual talk always about the same thing. Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it -- just as though one were in a madhouse or a prison.”
― Anton Chekhov

“I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
― William Shakespeare , Hamlet

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“And he has to live like this on the edge of destruction, alone, with nobody at all to understand or pity him”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
― Charlotte Bront?

“But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“It is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea