Quotes to inspire and reflect

In a month, in a year, how will we bear that so many seas separate me from you?

One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap.—And I found her bitter.—And I cursed her.

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which . . . my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

“My uncle always was respected;

The heart is an organ of fire.

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

The kids, like all kids, loved the dog [Checkers], and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

I like for you to be still, and you seem far away.

In Africa, when an old man dies, it is a library burning.

You are like nobody else since I love you.

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom.

Soon the birds and ancients

[ Replying to anti-Semitic taunting in the House of Commons :] Yes, I am a Jew! When the ancestors of the honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple!

While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives, one can, as artist, choose one’s “ancestors.”

[ Remarks at debate, University of Stockholm, 1957 :] I have always denounced terrorism. I must also denounce a terrorism which is exercised blindly, in the streets of Algiers for example, and which some day could strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother above justice.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier . Mother died today, or maybe it was yesterday. L’Étranger (The Stranger) pt. 1, ch. 1 (1942)

As generations come and go, / Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; / Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, / And feeble, of themselves, decay.

[ Of the Black Death :] How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world!

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origin, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Hardened round us, encasing wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere words.

There is no creation without tradition. No one creates from nothing.

Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value but because it has been forgotten.

Blood's thicker than water, and when one’s in trouble / Best to seek out a relative’s open arms.

Someday, before we all die, perhaps I shall get from home a letter in which all the news will be pleasant. 1 never have thus far.

I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents’ belief in phrenology seems now to us.

Everything disturbs an absent lover.

Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

Love reckons hours for months, and days for years; / And every little absence is an age.

On the whole, love comes with the speed of light; separation, with that of sound.

’Tis sweet to think, that, where’er we rove, / We are sure to find something blissful and dear, / And that, when we re far from the lips we love, / We’ve but to make love to the lips we are near.

Those who are absent, by its means become present; it [mail] is the consolation of life.

When you are in Rome you long to be in the country, and when you are in the country you praise the distant town to the skies.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

How great love is, presence best trial makes, / But absence tries how long this love will be.

It takes time for the absent to assume their true shape in our thoughts. After death they take on a firmer outline and then cease to change.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

Love all love of other sights controls, and makes one little room an everywhere.

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in life.

I thought I told you to wait in the car.

Your travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.

True friendship is seen through the heart, not through the eyes.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means.

When one has not had a good father one must create one.

Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.

Vote: the instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.