Image: Elena Torre from Viareggio, Italia, CC BY-SA 2.0
50 quotes
American novelist
“It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.”
"I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live."
on Life
"Songs are as sad as the listener."
on Art
"No father knows that he is carrying his son up the stairs for the final time"
"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living."
"With writing, we have second chances."
on Writing
"Every moment before this one depends on this one."
on Time
"I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
on Happiness
"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
"I kept thinking how they were all names of dead people, and how names are basically the only thing dead people keep."
on Death
"I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?"
"One can build a perfect home, but not live in it."
on Philosophy
"Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself."
on Wisdom
"The animals are those things that God likes but doesn't love."
on Ethics
"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
"The mistakes I've made are dead to me. But I can't take back the things I never did."
"Nothing goes away. Not on its own. You deal with it, or it deals with you."
"Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true."
"AND IF WE ARE TO STRIVE FOR A BETTER FUTURE, MUSTN'T WE BE FAMILIAR AND RECONCILED WITH OUR PAST?"
on History
"She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum."
on Emotion
"In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world"
