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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 37da543 | Your dad didn't die, so I won't be able to explain it to you. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| ab01283 | We tried so hard. We were always trying to help each other. But not because we were helpless. He needed to get things for me, just as I needed to get things for him. It gave us purpose. Sometimes I would ask him for something that I did not even want, just to let him get it for me. We spent our days trying to help each other help each other. I would get his slippers. He would make my tea. I would turn up the heat so he could turn up the air.. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| 7e1caf5 | Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love. | relationships love | Jonathan Safran Foer | |
| 31569c2 | My feelings have never once cared about what they should be. | Jonathan Safran Foer | ||
| d0aaf85 | Everybody's got a mean side. Just don't feed it till it grows. | Denis Johnson | ||
| e80b2d1 | These thoughts were as familiar to her, and as comforting, as the precise configuration of her knees, their matching but competing, symmetrical and reversible, look. A second thought always followed the first, one mystery bred another: Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did.. | Ian McEwan | ||
| d2452f9 | My grandfather used to say: Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -not to mention accidents- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey. | Franz Kafka | ||
| 578fbd8 | This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible. | Franz Kafka | ||
| a5a5b81 | Our winters are very long here, very long and very monotonous. But we don't complain about it downstairs, we're shielded against the winter. Oh, spring does come eventually, and summer, and they last for a while, but now, looking back, spring and summer seem too short, as if they were not much more than a couple of days, and even on those days, no matter how lovely the day, it still snows occasionally. | seasons | Franz Kafka | |
| 2105dbe | ktb@ lrsy'l .. t`ny 'n t`ry nfska 'mm l'shbH , w hw shy lTlm knw yntZrwnh bfrG lSbr. ktb@ lqubl fyh l y`ny 'nh stSl l~ mknh lmqSwd , bynm `l~ l`ks , ytkhTfh l'shbH `l~ Twl lTryq." (kfk l~ mylyn)" | Franz Kafka | ||
| 032e78f | Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup. | Milan Kundera | ||
| ff8bbde | When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed. | marriage | Milan Kundera | |
| 94903a2 | What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered." | Milan Kundera | ||
| 7004ea8 | They [human lives] are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with .. | Milan Kundera | ||
| 54ca08b | The woman he had loved most (he was thirty at the time) would tell him (he was nearly in despair when he heard it) that she held on to life by a thread. Yes, she did want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of a spiderweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything-- love, convictions, faith, histo.. | Milan Kundera | ||
| c6babb9 | We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap o.. | memory | Milan Kundera | |
| b44b87f | what's the matter?" he asked "nothing" "what do you want me to do for you?" "i want you to be old. ten years older. twenty years older" what she meant was: i want you to be weak. as weak as i am." -- | Milan Kundera | ||
| 87178cb | We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers. | Max Frisch | ||
| 4891838 | No man is an island... | Nick Hornby | ||
| d8c4b50 | It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself | Nick Hornby | ||
| c73e535 | A piece of writing is a trap," he said cheerily, "and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive--which is knowledge--alive forever." | Tad Williams | ||
| 1bd89fe | Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once. | light sun | Tad Williams | |
| 9ed2a21 | The strong look for more strength, the weak for excuses. | Margaret George | ||
| f52213e | I don't know, I don't feel right unless I've got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel's always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even. | Murakami Haruki | ||
| eb049b3 | No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can. | money murakami owe | Haruki Murakami | |
| d09f892 | Life is like a box of cookies. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| fc2cac3 | Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 320bb9b | Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. But | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5334506 | I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 2d54aff | Nah, I shook my head, things that come out of nowhere go back to nowhere, that's all. We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died long ago. Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claimed me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness. | separation | Haruki Murakami | |
| 254e1c9 | We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| d8c7131 | A fire can be any shape it wants to be. It's free. So it can look like anything at all, depending on what's inside the person looking at it. If you get this deep, quiet kind of feeling when you look at a fire, that's because it's showing you the deep, quiet kind of feeling you have inside yourself... | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 6245406 | Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep. | sleep volcano israeli-palestinian-conflict | Haruki Murakami | |
| 97a5349 | tw z mrg nmytrsy? - rstsh nh, khly adm byrzsh dydhm khh mrdn, w gr anh btwnnd bmyrnd, mn hm mytwnm. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| e717b14 | Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand) | words dreams | Haruki Murakami | |
| 1b352ad | If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others. Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whet.. | lose-one-s-self self-identity | Haruki Murakami | |
| 0737876 | It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable to find a place inside ourselves for the very real pain and suffering that these deformities cause, we come here to get away from such things. As long as we are here, we can get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because we know that we are "deformed". That's what distinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about their lives unconscious of t.. | people truth outside-world precondition hurt lives flaws | Haruki Murakami | |
| 6b6ae5b | Men don't need linguistic talent; they just need courage and words. | truth | Helen Fisher | |
| c7d100e | We know ourselves only as far as we've been tested. | Wisława Szymborska | ||
| c2acf8c | We frequently pass so near to happiness without seeing, without regarding it, or if we do see and regard it, yet without recognizing it. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| b1f4742 | When one loves, one is only too ready to believe one's love returned. | Alexandre Dumas | ||
| 90d578a | High School is the penalty for transgressions yet to be specified. | Frank Portman | ||
| a4842e4 | The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives... | Walker Percy | ||
| 895b7a5 | If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic. | suicide poetry reentry-problems | Walker Percy |