Lionel Shriver

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.

I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.

n a country that doesn't discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Rose Tremain

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

And she did not want him to think her quite mad, only a little unique, only containing within her just that measure of the unexpected sufficient to make her irreplaceable.

Music is so important in a human life. It finds a space inside us that nothing else touches.

Acceptance, she thinks, is the harshest lesson life teaches and the one most important to learn.

We have to become the people we always should have been.

And it is silence that she hears, the silence of lost years that have no voice left in them.

Inevitably we make a small world in the midst of a big one. For a small world is all we know how to make.

There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existance is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, witch is free.

Nuruddin Farah

I have tried my best to keep my country alive by writing about it.

She wondered then if she had ever been on the right track. She had been reticent all her life, because it turned out that her opinions were different from what others expected. That proves either that I am an exceptional idiot, or the reverse.

Death in Somalia seldom bothers to announce its arrival. In fact, death calls with the arrogance of a guest confident on receiving a warm welcome at any time, no question asked.

No writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.

What’s more, she gives shapes to the links between words and their meanings, and then fits them into chains of her own choosing.

It’s possible that some of us cannot help losing ourselves in the sorrows of other people’s stories.

There are moments in one's life when everything one considers to be a win is for all practical purposes a loss.

Álvaro Mutis

Life always holds in store surprises that are more complex and unforeseeable than any dream, and the secret is to let them come and not block them with castles in the air.

Since a good part of my life has been wasted dealing with fools just like them, it's not worry I feel but weariness as I watch the approach of one more episode in the old, tired story of men who try to beat life, the smart ones who think they know it all and die with a look of surprise on their faces: at the final moment they always see the truth - they never really understood anything, never held anything in their hands. An old story, old and boring.

Everything changed when I met the girl. She penetrated a corner of my soul that had been kept sealed and even I didn't know was there. With her gestures, the scent of her skin, her sudden, intense glances that filled me with overwhelming tenderness, with her dependence that was a kind of unthinking, absolute acceptance, she could rescue me instantly from my confusions and obsessions, my discouragement and failure, or my simple daily routine, and leave me inside a radiant circle made of throbbing energy and powerful certainty, like the effects of an unknown drug that produces unconditional happiness.

Adam Zagajewski

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

I drink from a small spring,
my thirst exceeds the ocean.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me; even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

In my defense I have
only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale
among the branches. You forgive it,
its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen
after another, drops of eternity, grams
of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets

Raja Rao

Then the wind comes so swift and dashing that it takes the autumn leaves with it, and they rise into the juggling air, while the trees bleat and blubber. Then drops fall, big as the thumb … the earth itself seems to heave up and cheep in the monsoon rains. It churns and splashes, beats against the treetops, reckless and wilful, and suddenly floating forwards, it bucks back and spits forward and pours down upon the green, weak coffee leaves, thumping them down to the earth.

Fortunately there are wars. And rationing is one of the grandest inventions of man. You stamp paper with figures and you feed stomachs on numbers.

Velayudhan Nair says: 'Man, we go to the doctor.' Velayudhan Nair always began every sentence with Man, for he had been to Bombay. In Colaba every De Souza says: Man. This they learned from the P & O ships. And P & O ships touch Plymouth. Do they say 'Man' there, one wonders.

There is but one force in life and that is Truth, and there is but one love in life and that is love of mankind, and there is but one God in life and that is the God of all.

Seenu rang the gong, and the eyes shut themselves in silence, and the brahmin heart and the weaver heart and pariah heart seemed to beat the one beat of Siva dancing.

Mia Couto

Listen, and you will realize that we are not made from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.

Whoever lived nailed to one floor cannot dream of other places.

Every morning the gazelle wakes up knowing she must run faster than the lion or will be dead. Every morning the lion wakes up knowing he must run faster than the gazelle or he'll starve. It doesn't matter if you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun rises you better start to run.

Life is too precious to waste in a disenchanted world.

Not living is what tires you the most.

Within each one is its darkness. And in that dark only lives who we invented there. It is we who fill the dark with our fears. 

Nostalgia is a tattoo on the soul: we only get rid of it by losing a piece of us.

It is not by holding wings that a bird is helped to fly. The bird flies simply because they let it be a bird.

In war the poor are killed. In peace, the poor die. 

I'm happy just for laziness. Unhappiness gives a worse hassle than disease: we have to get in and out of it, drive away those who want to comfort us, accept condolences for a portion of the soul that did not even die. 

Czesław Miłosz

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.

In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.

Learning: To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.

Language is the only homeland.

Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.

Margarita Engle

If only the peace I feel right now
could be stored up and released later
when cruelty surrounds me
in the dark
during nightmares.

I envy the trees that grow at crossroads. They are never forced to decide which way to go. . .

Some people are born with words flowing in their veins.

Marriage without love is just one more twisted form of slavery.

Can it be true that freedom only exists when it is a treasure, shared by all?

Books are enchanted. Books help me travel.
Books help me breathe.

I don't understand the whole thrilling verse, but I love the way poetry turns ordinary words into winged things that rise up and soar!

Octavio Paz

Deserve your dream.

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.

Love is an attempt to penetrate another being, but it can only be realized if the surrender is mutual.

Beyond myself, somewhere,
I wait for my arrival.

I don't believe that there are dangerous writers: the danger of certain books is not in the books themselves but in the passions of their readers.

It is always difficult to give oneself up; few persons anywhere ever succeed in doing so, and even fewer transcend the possessive stage to know love for what it actually is: a perpetual discovery, and immersion in the waters of reality, an unending re-creation.

Self-discovery is above all the realization that we are alone.

No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.