Aristotle And Dante Quotes

I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.

Words were different when they lived inside of you.

I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.

Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.

The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.

To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.

Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.

We all fight our own private wars.

But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.

And it seemed to me that Dante's face was a map of the world. A world without any darkness. Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?

How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?

I hated being volunteered. The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.

I had a feeling there was something wrong with me. I guess I was a mystery even to myself.

Sometimes, you do things and you do them not because you're thinking but because you're feeling. Because you're feeling too much. And you can't always control the things you do when you're feeling too much.

I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.

Your smile is back.' That's what Dante said. 'Smiles are like that. They come and go.

Scars. A sign that you had been hurt. A sign that you had healed.

I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.

I don't always have to understand the people I love.

Everyone was always becoming someone else.

I had a rule that it was better to be bored by yourself than to be bored with someone else. I pretty much lived by that rule. Maybe that's why I didn't have any friends.

Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused? Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire?

This is my problem. I want other people to tell me how they feel. But I'm not so sure I want to return the favor.

I have always felt terrible inside. The reasons for this keep changing.

Sometimes, all you have to do is tell people the truth. They won't believe you. After that, they'll leave you alone.

It was good to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I laughed myself into becoming someone else.

There are worse things in the world than a boy who likes to kiss other boys.

But I had learned to hide what I felt. No, that's not true. There was no learning involved. I had been born knowing how to hide what I felt.

I love swimming" "I know," I said. "I love swimming," he said again. He was quiet for a little while. And then he said, "I love swimming—and you." I didn't say anything. "Swimming and you, Ari. Those are the things I love the most.

I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.

I wanted to tell them that I'd never had a friend, not ever, not a real one. Until Dante. I wanted to tell them that I never knew that people like Dante existed in the world, people who looked at the stars, and knew the mysteries of water, and knew enough to know that birds belonged to the heavens and weren't meant to be shot down from their graceful flights by mean and stupid boys. I wanted to tell them that he had changed my life and that I would never be the same, not ever. And that somehow it felt like it was Dante who had saved my life and not the other way around. I wanted to tell them that he was the first human being aside from my mother who had ever made me want to talk about the things that scared me. I wanted to tell them so many things and yet I didn't have the words. So I just stupidly repeated myself. "Dante's my friend.

One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.

Do you think it will always be this way?” “What?” “I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?” I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don't know,” I said. “Tomorrow.

I wished it was raining," he said. "I don't need the rain," I said. "I need you.

I didn't understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without meanness?

Maybe tears were something you caught. Like the flu.

Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give.

Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you -- but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet?

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.

I knew that a part of him would never be the same. They cracked more than his ribs.

Try it again," I said. "Kiss me." "No," he said. "Kiss me." "No," And then he smiled. "You kiss me." I placed my hand on the back of his neck. I pulled him toward me. And kissed him. I kissed him. And I kissed him. And I kissed him. And I kissed him. And he kept kissing me back.

He tried not to laugh, but he wasn't good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.

Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.

You're every street I've ever walked. You're the tree outside my window, you're a sparrow as he flies. You're the book that I am reading. You're every poem I've ever loved.

It felt like there was a whole world living inside her. I didn't know anything about that world.

You should just sit them down and make them tell you. Make them be adults." "You can't make anyone be an adult. Especially an adult.

I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.

I didn't know what to do with that piece of information. So I just kept it inside. That's what I did with everything. Kept it inside.

The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.

The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.

Words could be like food - they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.

One summer night I fell asleep hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.

Did anybody ever tell you that you weren't normal?' 'Is that something I should aspire to?

And why was it that some guys had tears in them and some had no tears at all? Different boys lived by different rules.

There are worst things in life than kissing boys.

What do you love, Ari? What do you really love?" "I love the desert. God, I love the desert." "It's so lonely." "Is it?" Dante didn't understand. I was unknowable.

I have this idea that the reason we have dreams is that we're thinking about things that we don't know we're thinking about-and those things, well, they sneak out of us in our dreams. Maybe we're like tires with too much air in them. The air has to leak out. That's what dreams are.

Typically, I didn't know what to say so I didn't say anything.

If we studied birds, maybe we could learn to be free.

Feeling sorry for myself was an art. I think a part of me liked doing that.

I came to understand that my father was a careful man. To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing.

Smiles are like that. They come and go.

Those words tasted bitter. But the worst part was that those words were living inside me. And they were leaking out of me. Words were not things you could control. Not always.

I’m not into all this academic stuff. Too much analysis. What ever happened to reading a book because you liked it?

I was in love with the innocence of dogs, the purity of their affection. They didn't know enough to hide their feelings. They existed. A dog was a dog. There was such a simple elegance about being a dog that I envied.

All this time. This was what was wrong with me. All this time I had been trying to figure out the secrets of the universe, the secrets of my own body, of my own heart. All of the answers had always been so close and yet I'd always fought them without even knowing it. From the minute I'd met Dante, I had fallen in love with him. I just didn't let myself know it, think it, feel it. My father was right. And it was true what my mother said. We all fight our own private wars.

The Ari I used to be didn't exist anymore. And the Ari I was becoming? He didn't exist yet.

No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity.

The whole world seemed to be quiet and calm and I wanted to be the world and feel like that.

You matter more to the universe than you will ever know.

I guess I was a mystery even to myself.

Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.

Man loneliness was much bigger than boy loneliness.

You belong everywhere you go. That’s just how you are.

Maybe the problem between me and my father was that we were both the same.

In order to be wildly popular you had to make people believe that you were fun and interesting I just wasn't that much of a con artist.

Why did I have to be a good boy just because I had a bad-boy brother? I hated the way my mom and dad did family math.

I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.

Ari?” My father’s voice was soft. “Ari, Ari, Ari. You’re fighting this war in the worst possible way.” “I don’t know how to fight it, Dad.” “You should ask for help,” he said. “I don’t know how to do that, either.

For a few minutes I wished that Dante and I lived in the universe of boys instead of the universe of almost-men.

I thought he was only going to teach me how to swim in the waters of this swimming pool. Instead, he taught me how to dive into the waters of life.

Words were not things you could control. Not always.

I didn't care because what mattered is that Dante's voice felt real. And I felt real. Until Dante, being with other people was the hardest thing in the world for me. But Dante made talking and living and feeling seem like all those things were perfectly natural. Not in my world, they weren't.

Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.

Yeah, I had all kinds of tragic reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.

Summer had come and gone. Summer had come and gone. And the world was ending.

In your dream. You were looking for me." "I'm always looking for you," I whispered.

Mom, why didn't anybody tell me that love hurts so much?" "If I had told you, would it have changed anything?

The worst part about going crazy is that when you're not crazy anymore, you just don't know what to think of yourself.

Cowards start wars, and the brave fight them.

The funny thing is, I sometimes think my mother loves my father more than he loves her. Does that make sense?" "Yeah, I guess so. Maybe. Is love a contest?" "What does that mean?" "Maybe everyone loves differently. Maybe that's all that matters.

The world would be a better place if everyone did more thinking and less talking. There might be a lot less hatred.

And the hurt was so deep that it was way beyond tears and so their faces were dry.

Scars. A sign that you've been hurt. A sign that you have been healed. Had I been hurt? Had I been healed? Maybe we just lived between hurting and healing.

I was harder than Dante. I think I'd tried to hide that hardness from him because I'd wanted him to like me. But now he knew. That I was hard. And maybe that was okay. Maybe he could like the fact that I was hard just as I liked the fact that he wasn't hard.

It was like she understood something about me that she'd never quite understood before. I always felt that when she looked at me, she was trying to find me, trying to find out who I was. But it seemed at that moment that she saw me, that she knew me. But that confused me.

Stories were living inside us. I think we were born to tell our stories. After we died, our stories would survive. Maybe it was our stories that fed the universe the energy it needed to keep on giving life. Maybe all we were meant to do on this earth was to keep on telling stories. Our stories—and the stories of the people we loved.

Bullshit, Ari. You have the harder rule to follow? Buffalo shit. Coyote shit. All you have to do is be loyal to the most brilliant guy you've ever met—which is like walking barefoot through the park. I, on the other hand, have to refrain from kissing the greatest guy in the universe—which is like walking barefoot on hot coals.

There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets