Quotes About Obscurity

I hold a theory that, sooner or later, if a man but live long enough, certain books destined for his peculiar delight will find him, however obscure they or he may be.

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.

The tragedy of her death was not that it made one, now and then and very intensely, unhappy. It was that it made her unreal; and us solemn, and self-conscious. We were made to act parts that we did not feel; to fumble for words that we did not know. It obscured, it dulled.

So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen.

This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it.

These details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together.

Tinha a sensação estranhíssima de ser invisível, de não ser vista, ignorada.

Por debaixo é tudo escuro, é tudo dispersão, é insondavelmente profundo; mas, de quando em quando, subimos à superfície e é através disso que somos vistos" (Ao Farol, Virgínia Woolf)

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

but that mimosa grove - the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since. this then is my story. i have reread it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. at this or that twist of it i feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than i care to probe.

Look at this tangle of thorns.

What can be sadder than a discouraged artist dying not from his own commonplace maladies, but from the cancer of oblivion?

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece. Line

Light in comparison with darkness is a void.

This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My Calender is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don't think I can go on. Heart, head--everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat til page is full, printer.

The Goldsworth castle became particularly solitary after that turning point at dusk which resembles so much the nightfall of the mind. Stealthy

No wonder tobacco shops have a predilection for corners, for

Darkness and silence merged completely

He could not even see the bluish glimmer of a window or those faint patches of light which come to stay with the walls at night

o bien ocurría algo en que las gentes que caminan por la ciudad nunca se fijan: una estrella, más rápida que el pensamiento y más silenciosa que una lágrima, caía del firmamento

Eres la más opaca de todos los opacos

Fading into the wallpaper was so much safer than being noticed.

which almost nothing was known in Europe.

Up there- eighty-five miles high, ninety, ninety-five, the counter said- everything on earth would be invisible. Mothers who disappeared, fathers who didn't love you, kids who mocked you - everything would shrink to pinpoints and vanish. Up there : nothing but stars.