Milena Quotes

#1. You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.

Geoff Ryman

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. We must all, every one of us, relate to one another.

Milena Michiko Flasar

#11. I am an inexhaustible source of awkwardness.

Milena Veen

#12. I think I'm very complex. That's why I'm still writing after all of these years

Milena Gomez

#13. 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

#14. Growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really you are losing yourself.

Milena Michiko Flasar

#15. If only one were crazy enough to do everything differently

Milena Michiko Flasar

#16. Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

Peter De Vries

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. What is everlasting? We are fireworks. Glowing bright and fading, we scatter sparks that soon die out.

Milena Michiko Flasar

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. We're never as formidable as when we're in love and our love is reciprocated.

Milena Busquets

#23. Never interrupt someone who is reading because they're no longer in your world.

J.A. George

#24. There are rooms one never leaves.

Milena Michiko Flasar

#25. Out of the way! We are in the throes of an exceptional emergency! This is no occassion for sport- there is lace at stake! (Ms. Pole)

Elizabeth Gaskell

#26. I am one of many people documenting damage and looting at ancient sites from space - it is such a crucial tool.

Sarah Parcak

#27. Someone who only hears laughter in a laugh is deaf.

Milena Michiko Flasar

#28. Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

Paul Gibbons

#29. Going to a restaurant is one of my keenest pleasures. Meeting someplace with old and new friends, ordering wine, eating food, surrounded by strangers, I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

Adam Gopnik

#30. What you don't do, what you omit, often has more painful consequences than what you do.

Milena Michiko Flasar

#31. 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

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

Milena Banks

#33. Young people deserve stable employment opportunities and not mountains of debt. When young people can access the middle class, America is strengthened.

Patrick Murphy