Quotes by Romanian Authors - Page 4

Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky.
Elie Wiesel
Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. thats all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread.
Elie Wiesel
One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
Elie Wiesel
We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything--death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.
Elie Wiesel
Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.
Emil M. Cioran
It is natural that the appearance of pollution should have taken by surprise an economic science which has delighted in playing around with all kinds of mechanistic models. Curiously, even after the event economics gives no signs of acknowledging the role of natural resources in the economic process. Economists still do not seem to realize that, since the product of the economic process is waste, waste is an inevitable result of that process and ceteris paribus increases in greater proportion than the intensity of economic activity.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
You are at once both the quite and the confusion of my heart.
Nico J. Genes
Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Elie Wiesel
Men are naturally unequal. They are unequal members of one family, in which one can be brilliant, another mediocre, and another an imbecile. Hereditary substance is a mystery.
Tutea Petre
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
Elie Wiesel
I am the beast with a contorted grin, contracting down to illusion and dilating toward infinity, both growing and dying, delightfully suspended between hope for nothing and despair of everything, brought up among perfumes and poisons, consumed with love and hatred, killed by lights and shadows. My symbol is death of light and the flame of death. Sparks die in me only to be reborn as thunder and lightning. Darkness itself glows in me.
Emil M. Cioran
I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.
Emil M. Cioran
I feel as if I had been born dead underAmerican bombardment.
Ştefan Bolea
the deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the universal source of life.
Emil M. Cioran
The abundance of beards in periods of social unrest, times of revolt or upheaval, should be noted. It's the handiest way people have of making themselves mysterious.
Mihail Sebastian
The coding was anachronistic, kind of like bokeh in a renaissance painting.
Sorin Suciu
When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.
Constantin Brancusi
Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. (...) One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
Emil M. Cioran
Merkin had used only one drop of the “just soap.” Two drops would have made her Master walk slightly awkwardly. Three drops would have made a Victorian gentleman utter something really lustful, such as “you transfix me quite.
Sorin Suciu
At the last moment, she remembered that her Master might be watching her and, knowing that good girls bend at the knees while bad girls bend at the waist, she picked up the cigar butt, as it were, in style.
Sorin Suciu
Tahitians don’t chase happiness. Happiness comes naturally to them. You only need to see them in the water, with a beer in their hand, splashing each other or waving to every stranger they see on the road, to know this. Happiness is in the air: in every hibiscus flower that opens early in the morning, in the sweet aroma of the pineapple plantations, in the smile of the people lolling around idly, resting slothfully in the warm breeze that ruffles the surface of the lagoon.
Carol Vorvain
At the time of the liberation of the camps, I remember, we were convinced that after Auschwitz there would be no more wars, no more racism, no more hatred, no more anti-Semitism. We were wrong. This produced a feeling close to despair. For if Auschwitz could not cure mankind of racism, was there any chance of success ever? The fact is, the world has learned nothing. Otherwise, how is one to comprehend the atrocities committed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia…
Elie Wiesel
Was there someone absent from the table of creation?
Sorin Cerin
A stranger sleeps next to me, like a stone beside another stone.
Mihail Sebastian
What an odd thing a stranger is. A stranger sleeping next to you. I listen to his breathing as if it were his entire life, with its hidden processes, the pulsing of the blood in the tissues, with thousands of tiny hidden decays and combustions, which together create and maintain him.
Mihail Sebastian
I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.
Eugène Ionesco
Never give up on the idea you can become great. Always grab on the possibility you can become successful.
Sandu Andronic
Know your vision, live your vision, share your vision.
Alin Sav
People don´t need a job, they need a vision.
Alin Sav
A vision is a clear sound in a noisy world.
Alin Sav
I embraced her and she did not object at all. She let herself be kissed and kissed back, but coolly, without conviction, absently, as if she were smoking a cigarette.
Mihail Sebastian
Dying is more terrifying than actual death.
Ştefan Bolea
Despair is the state in which anxiety and restlessness are immanent to existence. Nobody in despair suffers from “problems”, but from his own inner torment and fire. It’s a pity that nothing can be solved in this world. Yet there never was and here never will be anyone who would commit suicide for this reason. So much for the power that intellectual anxiety has over the total anxiety of our being! That is why I prefer the dramatic life, consumed by inner fires and tortured by destiny, to the intellectual, caught up in abstractions which do not engage the essence of our subjectivity. I despise the absence of risks, madness and passion in abstract thinking. How fertile live, passionate thinking is! Lyricism feeds it like blood pumped into the heart!
Emil M. Cioran
The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.
Elie Wiesel
I will lose the habit of stars in the heavens, as frozen water loses the habit of snowflakes. I will take my frozen body, and give it to the young goats that they might graze it.
Nichita Stănescu
There was a rare quality about Nurse Grace’s smile. It was the knowledge that sooner or later her smile would inspire some witty observer to say something around the lines of, “Every time you do this, an angel farts”.
Sorin Suciu
Smile at a friend, at a stranger, at an enemy, at life’s absurdities and the universe will smile back at you.
Carol Vorvain
Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers.
Elie Wiesel
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
Eugène Ionesco
We were born in the mist of time on this land together with the oaks and fir trees. We are bound to it not only by the bread and existence it furnishes us as we toil on it, but also by all the bones of our ancestors who sleep in its ground. All our parents are here. All our memories, all our war-like glory, all our history here, in this land lies buried. . . . By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it.
Corneliu Codreanu
Invisible Christians in the world are only visible in church on Sunday.
Alin Sav
I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only - still, I left.
Mihail Drumeş
Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.
Herta Müller
I have always believed it my right to have a locked door between me and the world, and to hold the key myself. Now look at it, kicked open. The doors are off their hinges, the portals unguarded, every cover blown.
Mihail Sebastian
The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.
Emil M. Cioran
The cynicism of utter solitude is a calvary relieved by insolence.
Emil M. Cioran
I've always believed that the only defeats and victories that matter in life are those you lose or win alone, against yourself.
Mihail Sebastian
What a tremendous power one needs to become his own master!
Mihail Drumeş
Lola writes in her notebook: Leaf-fleas are even worse. Someone said, They don't bite people, because people don't have leaves. Lola writes, When the sun is beating down, they bite everything, even the wind. And we all have leaves. Leaves fall off when you stop growing, because childhood is all gone. And they grow back when you shrivel up, because love is all gone. Leaves spring up at will, writes Lola, just like tall grass. Two or three children in the village don't have any leaves, and those have a big childhood. A child like that is an only child, because it has a father and a mother who have been to school. The leaf-fleas turn older children into younger ones - a four-year-old into a three-year-old, a three-year-old into a one-year-old. Even a six-months-old, writes Lola, and even a newborn. And the more little brothers and sisters the leaf-fleas make, the smaller the childhood becomes.
Herta Müller
Dear child,you're not just anyone.One day,you're gonna have to make a choice.You have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be.Whoever that man is,good or bad,is gonna change the world
Pavel Visan Alexandru
Life is rather a short walk through eternity. Be they seeds, pups or infants, on the trek they all pick up weight, sensitivity and awareness. Then, much before the end of the run, they deteriorate, lead, legs and lungs. The tragicomedy of existence: the long walk of slow decay.
Dagobert D. Runes
We are born to Exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.
Emil M. Cioran
I knew that coming from a family with an unhealthy social origins, things would be harder for me. Nonetheless, in my heart, hope never died. However, over time, I had learned that trying never died either. Trying was one thing I always had to do more than others, because, in the self-proclaimed society of equals, we were made to be less equal than many of the families around us.
Teodor Flonta
The night I was born, my great uncle Moanea, the village forester, shot a wolf. The villagers roasted it in the fire and fed the meat to the dogs.
Teodor Flonta
However, at 17 years old, I was ready to face any challenge and tackle any obstacles blocking the road to my dreams. I was ready to take on the world. I was unstoppable. Bygones were bygones. The future, however uncertain it might be, awaited me.
Teodor Flonta
All the light was now coming from the East; and it looked breathtakingly new. In a very short time, everything was nationalized, from banks to factories, from pharmacies to little distilleries.
Teodor Flonta
My father also told me that he felt free in that little hole in the ground, much freer than he felt outside, where he was always being chased by the criminals of the regime. That freedom came from inside, from his thoughts, from his soul; and nobody could take that from him.
Teodor Flonta
While the new Legionnaire man eliminated his enemies in the name of God, with a cross in his hand, the new Communist man eliminated God altogether and stood on His pedestal. They were both equally thirsty for blood.
Teodor Flonta
He thought of his wife, of his son, of his youth. He thought of life. He thought of death and then he thought of life again.
Teodor Flonta
Never give up on learning because what you put up there in your brain,” he indicated my head with his index finger, “the Communists won’t ever be able to take away from you.
Teodor Flonta