Quotations from some lovely novels .

I learned this art from Akira Kurosawa. He used to take down notes of novels he read. Mostly Dostoevsky .i used to read , read a lot and then I used to yearn for some lines. Writing down these lines helped. As though one preserves these lines for sometime with oneself. It freezes the time. 

these are some of my favourite lines from the following novels 

 Sugar Street : Naguib Mahfouz

• My Dear Coffee-house, you are part of me. I have dreamt a lot and thought a lot inside you. What value does nostalgia have?Perhaps the past is the opiate of the romantic . It is most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a sceptical mind.
• When we are in love, we may resent it, but we certainly miss love once its gone.
• he had been his drinking partner.
• The most wretched thing that could happen in this world, would be having to ask in one step-hour one day, "where am I"?
• a woman does not need to read or write unless she is exchanging letters with a lover.
• I don’t care for sick romanticism
• independence is not the ultimate goal. It is a way to obtain people's constitutional, economic and human rights.
• Artists too must learn their share of science. It is no longer just for scientists.
• I am a tourist in a museum where nothing belongs to me, I am merely a historian. I don’t know where I stand. You observe and ponder everything with total freedom acting like a tourist
• I am certain that I am miserable , despite having created a life that assures me both intellectual pleasures and bodily delights.
• You have liberated your mind from every fetter, but your body is bound with chains. Your body, at-least your body was created to be a teacher.

Notes from Heart of darkness : Conrad.

• No, I don’t like work . I had rather laze about and think of all fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does but I like what is in the work, the chance to find yourself. Your own reality- for yourself. Not for others, what no other man ever knows.
• There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself, but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, water and silence.
• Intimacy grows quickly out there,I knew him as well as it is possible for any man to know another
• he had given me some reason to infer that it was his impatience of comparative poverty that drove him out there.
• The last words were : the horror! The horror!
• Pull of the primitive upon the men
• what white civilization is doing in a black Africa, sine in effect,its veneer soon vanishes in situations, where colonialists are far from their own European environment.

Mediations : Rene Decarte

• usefulness and greater appearance of truth, which shows us man naked. Empty aware of his natural weakness. Fit to accept outside help from high.
• Our senses frequently deceive us
• what do we know ( que sais je) ? The implied answer is very little.
• Favours conservatism due to ,imitation in our native intelligence : faith over reason
• anyone who regards themselves more intelligent from others take refuge in scepticism. When they find nothing in the commonly accepted philosophy to satisfy them and cant see any alternative which is more true.
• Waldeinsamkeit : the feeling of being alone in the woods

Notes from Norwegian woods: Murakami

• I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend.
• But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you, better than anyone else in the world
• I want you to always remember me. Will you remember that I existed and that I stood next to you here like this ?
• A map that shows too much can sometimes be useless
• have you ever be in love? Never
• that has not had the baptism of time
• when you are surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up
• we had completed one full cycle of the seasons, only dead stay 17 forever
• I think you got me all wrong
• the true enemy of this bunch was not state power, but lack of imagination
• way more than I need. I wish I could give you some to help you sleep
• you have to find those 'episodes'
• I have got pretty good intuition, I am hopeless as a logical thinker, though
• you should not trust anyone who calls himself an ordinary man
• because we would have to pay the world back what we owed it
• it was an awfully long day
• that can be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh
• I sucked the music right out of it
• what does sine and cosine mean \?
• Peace. Peace.
• Polaroid camera.
• Its good when food tastes good, its kind of like proof that you are alive.
• Did you ever run away from home, wanatbe . Never. Why not ? Lack of imagination. It never occurred to me to run away.
  Notes from Little Prince
• They always need explanations
• I have seen them at very close quarters which I am afraid has not greatly enhanced my opinion of them
• I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously
• straight ahead of oneself, one can not go very far
• grown ups love figures
• it is sad to forget a friend, not everyone has had a friend.

Notes from Wedding Song: Naguib Mahfouz.

• No one is crueler than an idealist. Who is responsible for all the carnage in this world ? Idealists.
• Why don't we keep track of the happy moments, so that afterwards we will believe them?
• And the people are clapping, they are clapping!
• So when does one become a whore?
  After getting raped.
  After sleeping with someone
  after developing a desire. When ?
• If these walls could speak they would tell you the most fantastic tales
• the dramas of the stage, with their heroes and victims, had moved into our house.
• I used to make lengthy speeches about these things to myself in my solitariness
• A playwright must learn about everything, the good and the bad. The theatre had its fountain-head in wickedness
• It is unfortunate that life of the soul can not do without money
• Abu-al-Ala-al-Ma'arry ( 973-1057) born near Aleppo was a blind poet-philosopher who is said to have been a sceptic, free thinking and materialist.
• What is life? It is the struggle of soul against materialism.
• The battle in mind between the erotics of Omar Khayyam and epic romance of Magnun Leila.
• He is going to be the author of tragedy, how beautiful, that anyone could be virtuous these days, his eyes are weak, so he cant see what is going around him .
• Could there be a playwright without love?
• Failure in art is death itself- that is the way we are made and art, in my case, was made not just art but the surrogate for action that an idealist like me is unable to take.
• A world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone.