Yana Stoycheva > Yana's Quotes

“Like some dogs: kick them once and they never trust you again, no matter how nice you are to them.”
― stephen king, The Green Mile

“ Тая любов на шега излезе най-голямата истина в живота ми! Защо трябва винаги да бъдем сериозни, непогрешими и скучни като пътни указатели? Хора, сърцето ви е домашно куче, свикнало с късия синджир и кошарата. ”
― Blaga Dimitrova, Отклонение

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose

“И колкото по-неудържим бе в мене стремежът да се махна, толкова по-сляп вътрешен тласък ме блъскаше назад.”
― Блага Димитрова, Пътуване към себе си

“The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. His soul can be free. His personality can be untroubled. He can be at peace. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realize through that sin his true perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are those who love to get dirty and fix things. They drink coffee at dawn, beer after work. And those who stay clean, just appreciate things. At breakfast they have milk and juice at night. There are those who do both, they drink tea.”
― Gary Snyder

“As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times.”
― Gary Snyder

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
― William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

“The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
― William Blake

“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine

“An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time. ”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“There is something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t ever try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.
I’d seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you're really in despair.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

“Why kid ourselves, people have nothing to say to one another, they all talk about their own troubles and nothing else. Each man for himself, the earth for us all. They try to unload their unhappiness on someone else when making love, they do their damnedest, but it doesn't work, they keep it all, and then they start all over again, trying to find a place for it. "Your pretty, Mademoiselle," they say. And life takes hold of them again until the next time, and then they try the same little gimmick. "You're very pretty, Mademoiselle..."

And in between they boast that they've succeeded in getting rid of their unhappiness, but everyone knows it's not true and they've simply kept it all to themselves. Since at the little game you get uglier and more repulsive as you grow older, you can't hope to hide your unhappiness, your bankruptcy, any longer. In the end your features are marked with that hideous grimace that takes twenty, thrity years or more to climb form your belly to your face. That's all a man is good for, that and no more, a grimace that he takes a whole lifetime to compose. The grimace a man would need to express his true soul without losing any of it is so heavy and complicated that he doesn't always succeed in completing it.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

“The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, The Church: A Comedy in Five Acts

“Дадох си сметка, за пръв път с тази яснота (яснотата на януарския въздух), че онова, което остава не са извънредните моменти, не са събитията, а тъкмо нищонеслучващото се. Време, освободено от претенцията за изключителност. Спомени за следобеди, в които нищо не се е случило. Нищо, освен живота, в цялата му пълнота.”
― Georgi Gospodinov, Физика на тъгата

“Човешките същества обичат да се прегръщат. Ако случайно срещнете оцеляло човешко същество, отваряте широко горните си крайници и леко го обгръщате. Добре е да задържите ръцете си така колкото може повече. На човешкото същество това ще му донесе голямо успокоение. Възможно е да се разплаче с бистра течност от очите. Човешките същества обичат да плачат. Не е страшно, не се умира от това.”
― Георги Господинов, Физика на тъгата

“Старостта е свикване.”
― Георги Господинов, Физика на тъгата

“Трябваше да избягам от нея, ако исках да остана жив. Да я напусна, да напусна града по най-буквалния начин. Няколко месеца обикалях Европа. За да забравят една връзка, някои опитват безразборен секс, аз опитах безразборна география. Избирах случайни градове, пътувах обикновено с влак, сменях гари и хотели, всички туристи бяха на групи или по двойки, аз обикалях сам из площадите, които от един момент започнаха да изглеждат едни и същи. Приличах на човек, който иска да изостави собдтвената си изоставеност зад някой ъгъл. Като някой търсещ отдалечно и непознато място, където да пусне котките на тъгите си, така че те никога да не намерят обратния път. Знаеш ли колко е трудно да се отървеш от котки? Те притежават невероятно чувство за дом, особена памет.”
― Георги Господинов, Физика на тъгата

“Дори да не си се родил във Версай, Атина, Рим или Париж, възвишеното все пак ще намери образ да ти се яви. Ако не си чел Псевдо-Лонгин, не си чувал за Кант или... ако обитаваш вечните неграмотни поля на анонимни села и градове, на пусти дни и нощи, то пак ще ти се открие, на собствения ти език. Като дим от комина в зимна сутрин, като парче тъмносиньо небе, като облак, който ти спомня нещо от друг свят, като биволско лайно. Възвишеното е навсякъде.”
― Георги Господинов, Физика на тъгата

“Knowing that the voice wouldn’t scream to be heard, they made sure that the world stayed loud with music and movies and 24/7 news and incessant online chatter. If they couldn’t silence the whisper, they’d bombard people with other voices. Infinite choices.”
― Lauren Miller, Free to Fall

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“Ако хората не забравят войната, ражда се много омраза. Ако я забравят, почва нова. Така казвали древните.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Войната не е с лице на жена / Последните свидетели

“Anna despises two classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, Wonderful, Wonderful Times

“The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher