Milena Quotes & Sayings

And you know what? My kisses are mine. I don't have to explain them to anyone, I'll give them out as I see fit and to whomever I want. Like money. Except that everyone has kisses, they're much more democratic, and a lot more dangerous too, since they put us all on the same level. And if you did the same, if we all did the same, the world might be a little more chaotic but a lot more fun. — Milena Busquets

And don't demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I'm sure, perhaps everything eludes me. — Franz Kafka

And you? What brings you here? I shrugged my shoulders. No idea? Hm, you're still young. Eighteen? I froze. Nineteen? Twenty? Incredible, so young. You have everything before you. No past. He sighed. Incredible, to have been so young once myself. Although what does that mean? There is only one age for anyone. I was and am, will always be fifty-eight. But you. Be careful what age you end up. It sticks to you. It seals you shut. The age you choose is like glue, it sets around you. This wisdom is not mine, you know. I got it from a book. A movie. I'm not sure. You notice things. It's incredible. Your whole life you notice things. — Milena Michiko Flasar

What is everlasting? We are fireworks. Glowing bright and fading, we scatter sparks that soon die out. — Milena Michiko Flasar

Before I knew my dear Milena, I thought life itself was unbearable. Then she came into my life and showed me that that was not so. True, our first meeting was not auspicious, for her mother answered the door, and what a strong forehead the woman had, with an inscription on it which read: "I am dead, and I despise anyone who is not." Milena seemed pleased that I had come, but much more pleased when I left. That day, I happened to look at a map of the city. For a moment it seemed incomprehensible to me that anyone would build a whole city when all that is needed was a room for her. — Lydia Davis

Can you hear me? Sighing. You were right. My requiem is well prepared. Still to be written is the poem that is never complete, an endless rubbing on the ink block, an endless dipping of the pen, an endless swoop over the white paper, the poem of my life. I will try to write it down. Soon, no, now, I will try. The first line. I called him Necktie. I will write: He taught me to see with eyes of feeling. — Milena Michiko Flasar

Milena - what a rich heavy name, almost too full to be lifted, and in the beginning I didn't like it much, it seemed to me a Greek or Roman gone astray in Bohemia, violated by Czech, cheated of its accent, and yet in colour and form it is marvellously a woman, a woman whom one carries in one's arms out of the world, and out of the fire, I don't know which, and she presses herself willingly and trustingly into your arms. — Franz Kafka

I am an inexhaustible source of awkwardness. — Milena Veen

Someone who only hears laughter in a laugh is deaf. — Milena Michiko Flasar

he hadn't killed or shagged even one single person in front of me - which I felt was a rather good indication of his superior character. — Hettie Ivers

We must all, every one of us, relate to one another. — Milena Michiko Flasar

If there is anything for you to learn, it's only that you should not be ashamed. Don't be ashamed to be a person with feelings. No matter what it is, feel it tenderly and deeply. Feel it more tenderly, feel it more deeply. Feel it for yourself. Feel it for yourself. Feel it for others. And then: Let it go. — Milena Michiko Flasar

You can tell if someone really loves Books by the way they look at them, how they open and close them, how they turn the pages. — Milena Busquets

He was shy, timid, gentle, and kind, but he wrote gruesome and painful books. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, who tear apart and destroy defenseless people. He was too clear-sighted and too wise to be able to live; he was too weak to fight, he had that weakness of noble, beautiful people who are not able to do battle against the fear of misunderstandings, unkindness, or intellectual lies. Such persons know beforehand that they are powerless and go down in defeat in such a way that they shame the victor. He knew people as only people of great sensitivity are able to know them, as somebody who is alone and sees people almost prophetically, from one flash of a face. He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world. — Milena Jesenska

Writing letters ... means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
[Kafka to Milena] — Kafka, Franz

If only one were crazy enough to do everything differently — Milena Michiko Flasar

You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think. — Geoff Ryman

A spectacular novel of colonial China that should put this first-time author on the map." - Kirkus Reviews — Milena Banks

Milena's eyes seemed to go hot and heavy. Praise made her heartsick; she was so unused to it, and needed it so badly. — Geoff Ryman

What you don't do, what you omit, often has more painful consequences than what you do. — Milena Michiko Flasar

We're never as formidable as when we're in love and our love is reciprocated. — Milena Busquets

If only I had cried, just once. I watched myself not crying. Jaw firm. Swallow. Break something. Quick. The mirror there, broken. And again. Smash your fist into it. A reassuring pain, masking the real one. The one that is not there. Which you force yourself not to feel. Sweep up the fragments. And away with them. To know, to know better, that not crying is crying. And yet you do not cry. Firm up the jaw. Swallow. — Milena Michiko Flasar

Am I still writing? Unthinkable not to. In the very darkest night the words were like shiny pebbles. They caught the light of the moon and stars and reflected it back. One word among them that shone especially brightly. Simplicity. I would approach it, stepping softly, regard it from all sides, finally pick it up, enchanted by it, recognize that its enchantment lay in its shine, its pure meaning. Simplicity. To simply be there. Simply keep going. The longer I kept going, the easier it was to see how beautiful, simply beautiful, it is to be here.

I would like to write about how this word shines. I'd like to write about the simplest things. — Milena Michiko Flasar

I am a plant, she said, I need fire, earth, water. Otherwise I will be stunted. And: Is marriage not such a stunting? The fire goes out. The wind grows weak. The earth dries out. The water dwindles. I would die. You too. She tossed her hair over her shoulders. Purple lavender. And what if it wasn't like that, I argued. What if the daily routine, our daily routine, is my promise to you? Your toothbrush next to mine. You get annoyed because I've forgotten to turn the light off in the bathroom. We choose wallpaper we think is horrible a year later. You tell me I'm getting a belly. Your forgetfulness. You've left your umbrella somewhere again. I snore, you can't sleep. In my dream I whisper your name...You tie my tie. Wave goodbye to me as I go to work. I think: you are like a fluttering flag. I think it with a stabbing pain in my heart. For Heaven's sake, is that not enough? Is that not enough to be happy? She turned away: Give me time. I'll think about it. — Milena Michiko Flasar

I will never be seen through your eyes again. When the world begins to depopulate of the people who love us, we become, little by little and following the rhythm of death, strangers. My place in the world was in your gaze and it was so unquestionable and perpetual that I never bothered to find out what was there. — Milena Busquets

I think I'm very complex. That's why I'm still writing after all of these years — Milena Gomez

Milena found Cilia outside, holding her bamboo box. Milena hugged her. 'I'm sorry about your shins,' she said. Milena lifted the lid of the box, and saw it, the precious paper, ruled in staves. People were generous. Milena had never believed that. — Geoff Ryman

There are rooms one never leaves. — Milena Michiko Flasar

How come you're so different, I asked once, as we sat in the shade of the pine tree. Yukiko's answer, a sentence learned by heart: Because I fell from a star. — Milena Michiko Flasar

Growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself. — Milena Michiko Flasar

They call it mourning. And I think that was the reason he tried so hard to be someone who functioned. By holding on to how things had always been, he was mourning what was missing. — Milena Michiko Flasar

We had struck a pact: Better not to know anything about each other. And this pact is what holds families together for generations. We wore masks. Our faces no longer recognizable underneath, for our masks had grown onto us. It hurt to pull them off. It hurt so much that the pain of never meeting face to face was bearable, compared to the pain of showing your true face. — Milena Michiko Flasar

How to describe the bitterness? I was a glass, broken, and the space I once enclosed was now the same as the space around. Deserted space, in which I was lost, sharp knives under my feet. With each step it became less likely that I would ever get anywhere. — Milena Michiko Flasar

It seemed to me that life was a giant ice skating rink, and I was the only one who didn't have skates. Most people fear death. I don't. I'm only afraid of not living. I don't want to be the one behind the ice rink fence, watching other people having fun. — Milena Veen

I'm on such a dangerous road, Milena. You're standing firmly near a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes subduing with their radiance the suffering world. — Franz Kafka

He pointed to the right and left. We are unfree, all of us. Only, that does not absolve us of responsibility. Despite our lack of freedom we constantly make decisions and we have to take responsibility for them and their consequences. And so, with every decision we take we become less free. — Milena Michiko Flasar

Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty. Franz Kafka (in a letter to Milena Jesenska) — Edmund White

I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels. — Franz Kafka

A year later, when I turned sixteen, my father died of cancer. And from then on the dead form a sort of chain, a macabre necklace that weighs a ton, and whose last, closing link will be me, I guess. — Milena Busquets