Amy > Amy's Quotes

“I was aware that I was on the moon, but the immense distance separating me from the earth was a pure abstraction for me. I felt as though the people I spoke with on the phone were somewhere close by—not because I could hear their voices clearly in the receiver, but because I couldn’t imagine how the entirely immaterial official relationships and personal feelings that linked us together could be stretched so far. But the strangest thing was that the memories connecting me with childhood could extend over such an incomprehensible distance too.”
― Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra

“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“One reads alone, even in another's presence.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.”
― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“It's the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“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

“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“No matter what he does, every person on earth plays a central role in the history of the world. And normally he doesn't know it.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there's no need at all to understand what's happening, because everything happens within you.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Don't give in to your fears. If you do, you won't be able to talk to your heart.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist