Jools.Reads > Jools.Reads's Quotes

“Ich glaube, daß jener Apparat, der die Aufnahme und Verarbeitung von Wirklichkeit zu tätigen hat, von Literatur geformt wird”
― Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood

“People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Post-Office Girl

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
― Alan Bennett, The History Boys

“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
― James A. Baldwin

“A weed is a plant out of place.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
― Jim Henson

“I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going but I'm on the way.”
― Carl Sandburg, Breathing Tokens

“Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”
― Walter Bagehot

“I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“I’d love to step off this well-trodden straight and boring path. To somehow live differently, think different thoughts, feel different feelings than others. It wouldn’t bother me to be as alone as a tree on the plains. My leaves would be like no other tree’s.”
― Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower

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

“To hell with ideas—if people always did what, on careful consideration, was in their most selfish interest, there would be nothing with the world, there would be nothing wrong with the world. Who wants to die and starve? Nobody. If people weren’t driven crazy by ideas and their God, nobody would, for instance, go to war in order to starve and to die a beastly death.”
― Béla Zsolt, Nine Suitcases: A Memoir

“Let crazy life rush headlong on the highway for others; we shall contemplate the sunflowers, watch them sprout, blossom, fade away. Yesterday they were still giants, but now, in autumn, they are thatch on the roof.”
― Gyula Krúdy, Sunflower

“I encounter one example after another of how relative truth is.”
― Raoul Wallenberg

“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time”
― Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess

“I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen

“If you speak the truth, the monster whispered in his ear, you will be able to face whatever comes.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Play it fuckin' loud!”
― Bob Dylan

“Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you’re tired. You look like you could go on forever.”
― Leonard Cohen

“There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva

“My imagination functions much better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Lesen, lesen, immer nur lesen und darüber die eigene erbärmliche Existenz vergessen!”
― Walter Moers, Das Labyrinth der Träumenden Bücher

“If someone wants to give you money, whatever the source, you should take it. Every religious-historical authority agrees about that.”
― Antal Szerb

“The staying awake was a great self-sacrificaing gesture of friendship, and wonderfully in keeping with our current mood of intense friendship and religious fervour. We were all in a state of shock. We engaged in a long Dostojevskyan conversations and drank one black coffee after another. It was sort of night typical of youth, the sort you only can look back on with shame and embarassment once you've grown up. But God knows, I must have grown up already by then, because I don't feel the slightest embarassment when I think back to it, just a terrible nostalgia.”
― Antal Szerb, Journey by Moonlight

“You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“Come now, don't make such a funeral face. It isn't dying that's sad; it's living when you're not happy.”
― Octave Mirbeau, Le Jardin des supplices

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton