Eszter Kissová

“True happiness is impossible without solitude…. I need solitude in my life as I need food and drink and the laughter of little children. Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discovered that I keep myself good company.”

“Food makes people happy, it takes you back home, it says so many things that words can’t say.”

“My mother taught me the most important principles, to be determined in life, to be disciplined, to be able to understand that there are some things that you can’t do and other things you have to do, that you always have to be surrounded by love, that you have to be understanding.”

“Discipline is the great equalizer. If a young woman is beautiful but has no discipline, she will lose her looks as she grows older. If a plain woman is disciplined she will undoubtedly become more beautiful with time.”

“Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.”

“Being beautiful can never hurt, but you have to have more. You have to sparkle, you have to be fun, you have to make your brain work if you have one.”

“Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.”

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”

“Ignorance has its virtues; without it there’d be mighty little conversation.”

“Success, I would find out, is interior. It has to do with self-fulfillment and the joy of living.”

“Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others.”

“We know well only what we are deprived of.”

“A good critic is the sorcerer who makes some hidden spring gush forth unexpectedly under our feet.”

“The arrogance of poets is only a defense; doubt gnaws the greatest among them; they need our testimony to escape despair.”

“I believe that only poetry counts… A great novelist is first of all a great poet.”

“The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.”

“Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.”

“This God who, as the psalmist said, built His tabernacles in the sun, now establishes Himself in the very core of the flesh and the blood.”

“What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.”