Quotes from book

Aleph

“Life is a dream from which we wake only when we meet death.”

“Time neither moves nor is stationary. Time changes.”

“I have only one certainty: there exists a parallel spiritual universe that impinges on the world in which we live. Apart from that, everything else seems absurd to me—sacred books, revelations, guides, manuals, ceremonies … and, what is worse, they appear to have no lasting effects.”

“Whenever I refused to follow my fate, something very hard to bear would happen in my life.”

“The light of love flows out of my soul, but it can go nowhere because it’s blocked by pain. I could inhale and exhale every morning for the rest of my life, but that wouldn’t solve anything.”

“Here I am, trying to persuade myself that I always give the best of myself, and nature is telling me exactly the opposite: anyone truly committed to life never stops walking.”

“Lao-tzu’s words, was: place all your feelings outside of yourself and you will be renewed.”

“Never. We never lose our loved ones. They accompany us; they don’t disappear from our lives. We are merely in different rooms. For example, I can’t see who is in the next carriage, but it contains people traveling in the same time as me, as you, as everyone. The fact that we can’t speak to them or know what’s going on in that other carriage is completely irrelevant. They are there. So what we call ‘life’ is a train with many carriages. Sometimes we’re in one, sometimes we’re in another, and sometimes we cross between them, when we dream or allow ourselves to be swept away by the extraordinary.”

“If I were to persuade just one person to stop fighting for something they were convinced was worthwhile, I would end up persuading myself, and my whole life would be diminished.”

“Every note leaves in each of us a memory, but it is the melody as a whole that tells a story, the story of someone wanting to get closer to another person and who keeps on trying, despite repeated rejections.”

“No one can learn to love by following a manual, and no one can learn to write by following a course. I’m not telling you to seek out other writers but to find people with different skills from yourself, because writing is no different from any other activity done with joy and enthusiasm.”

“Don’t let yourself be destroyed by a force that was placed in our hearts in order to make everything better.”

“You feel that nothing you have learned has put down roots, that while you’re capable of entering the magical universe, you cannot remain submerged in it. You feel that all of this may be nothing but a fantasy dreamed up by people to fend off their fear of death.”

“you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.”

“Life has been very hard on me, but, at the same time, it has taught me a great deal.”

“When I knocked, the door opened. When I looked, I found.”

“If someone is giving us something, that’s because we’re incapable of getting it for ourselves.”

“So, in my relationships with men, I’ve always sought suffering, conflict, and despair.”

“What can’t be cured must be endured.”