Quotes

“Clear thinking at the wrong moment can stifle creativity.”― Karl Lagerfeld

"The moment I came into the atmosphere of the Ulpius house my chronic sense of shame vanished, as did my nervous symptoms. When Tamás pulled me from the whirlpool, that was the last time it afflicted me. Nobody peered over my shoulder again, or stared at me in the darkness of night. I slept peacefully, and life granted what I expected of it. Physically I knitted together, and my face became unlined. This was the happiest time of my life, and if some smell or effect of the light stirs up the memory of it, I still experience the same rapturous, deceptive, elusive happiness, the first happiness I ever knew." - Antal Szerb

"You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."-- Mary Oliver

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”― Franz Kafka

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

There never seemed to be good weather in this village, because the Creator was always experimenting with His sky. - Salka Valka

To grow up is to come to the realization that you have no mother, but lie there alone, unsleeping, in the dark of night. From then on, she had no mother. Maybe no one had a mother. Maybe no one actually had anyone but themselves. - Salka Valka

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the greatgrandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language. Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs -- The Book Against Death

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—

My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,
not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.
- Crossroads by Louise Glück

And this man, who in a flash sees the universe naked, creates a philosophy or dreams up a religion; and the philosophy spreads and the religion propagates, and those who believe in the philosophy begin to wear it as a suit they don't see, and those who believe in the religion put it on as a mask they soon forget.

Knowing neither ourselves nor each other, and therefore cheerfully getting along, we keep twirling round in the dance and chatting during the intervals - human, futile, and in earnest - to the sound of the great orchestra of the stars, under the aloof and disdainful gaze of the show's organizers. - Fernando Pessoa

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.-- Michel de Montaigne