“In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats”

We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

I’d obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

Reading is more important than writing.

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.

Nothing is ever behind us.

When you die of sorrow it’s as if you’ve broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That’s sorrow.

You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

I don’t care who scores the goals, I’m going to leave my human beingness on the field!

Four goals in (16) minutes. Literally I don’t even know how that happens especially in a World Cup final.

Aim high, aim at the highest, and all lower aims are thereby achieved. It is looking below on the stormy sea of differences that makes you sink. Look up, beyond these and see the One Glorious Real, and you are saved.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

A small laugh startled me and I looked over to see her actually smiling. Making her do that more often was a new goal.

The state of self-realization, as we call it, is not attaining something new or reaching some goal which is far away, but simply being that which you always are and which you always have been.

Concentration of the mind is in a way common to both Knowledge and Yoga. Yoga aims at union of the individual with the universal, the Reality. This Reality cannot be new. It must exist even now, and it does exist.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.