"No novels, since you just read them once and never again."

Herta Müller Literature See all quotes by Herta Müller →

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“Half starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects.”

“You can think all kinds of things. But you can't know for sure.”

“If you don't have the right things, you improvise. the wrong things become necessary. Then the necessary things turn out to be the only right things, simply because they're what you have.”

“The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse.”

“You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you’ve even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. For here to there it’s all just the farty sputter of lantern. And they call that having lived. It’s not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.”

“Being a stranger is hard, but being a stranger when you're so impossibly close is unbearable.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I spent my nights reading Proust’s A Remembrance of Things Past, admiring the lucid, subtle but strong prose, stupefied by its dazzling magic, awed by the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological …"

— Richard Wright

Literature1943–2008

#books

"Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the "one." Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the "many."

— Robert M. Pirsig

Literature1928–2017

#time

"If someone lays the notes on a page in front of me, it's meaningless...because to me you can't express the rhythms properly like that. It's a very ineffective way of doing it, so I've never really bot…"

— Thom Yorke

Music1968

#friendship