Quotes from Books

      I don’t want every one to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.

-Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Long ago, I learned how to be brave, how to go forward always.

-Homer, The Iliad

Who then may trust the dice, at Fortune’s throw?

-Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Let me say before I go that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell.

-Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me.

-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can always hope.

-Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of a transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there any more—is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. …

The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary—and toward this our development will move gradually—that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. …

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

 - Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet