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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6fd4f70 | The narrative compression of storytelling, especially in the movies, beguiles us with happy endings into forgetting that sustained stress is corrosive of feeling. It's the great deadener. Those moments of joyful release from terror are not so easily had. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 5dd73e5 | Being late was a special kind of modern suffering, with blended elements of rising tension, self-blame, self-pity, misanthropy, and a yearning for what could not be had outside theoretical physics: time reversal. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 55493aa | On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. | Ian McEwan | ||
| b6a126f | I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, ... | Ian McEwan | ||
| df47742 | It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 22f7c94 | Lovers arrive at their first kisses with scars as well as longings. They're not always looking for advantage. Some need shelter, others press only for the hyperreality of ecstasy, for which they'll tell outrageous lies or make irrational sacrifice. But they rarely ask themselves what they need or want. | Ian McEwan | ||
| 16f8088 | I don't know,' I cried without being heard, 'I do not know, If nobody comes, then nobody comes. I've done nobody any harm, nobody's done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. Yet that isn't all true. Only, that nobody helps me - a pack of nobodies would be rather fine, on the other hand. I'd love to go on an excursion - why not? - with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies jost.. | nobodies | Franz Kafka | |
| 66c0579 | you are the knife i turn inside myself; that is love, that, my dear, is love | Franz Kafka | ||
| ecf8e9f | Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath. | Franz Kafka | ||
| 6a4486d | There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship. | Franz Kafka | ||
| d716b0d | The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not. | existentialism forever heaven paradise present present-moment | Franz Kafka | |
| 37a9a05 | He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent. | Nick Hornby | ||
| b53cfb3 | But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 5566adc | We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 83a997d | smu `y'ltn 'yD, hw yuqsam ln blmSdf@, dwn 'n n`rf mt~ Zhr fy l`lm, wl kyf ltaqaTahu 'Hd l'jdd lmjhwlyn. nn lnfhm hdh lsma mTlqan, wl n`rf shyy'an `n trykhh, wm` dhlk nHmlh bkhlS mumajWd, ntwHWd bh wyrwq ln jdan, wnfkhr bh bshkl yd`w llskhry@ km lw 'nn nHn ldhyn btd`nh tHt t'thyr lhm `bqry | Milan Kundera | ||
| 739a36f | She had come to him to escape her mother's world, a world where all bodies were equal. She had come to him to make her body unique, irreplaceble. But he, too had drawn an equal sign between her and the rest of them: he kissed them all alike, stroked them all alike, made no, absolutely no distiction between Tereza's body and the other bodies. He sent her back to the world she tried to escape, sent to march naked with the other naked women | Milan Kundera | ||
| 0c4679a | By writing books, a man turns into a universe. | Milan Kundera | ||
| c0e7fbc | His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops... That was nine units of a twenty-.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 4134a48 | There are no truly strong people. Only people who pretend to be strong. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| df429fa | Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 7c7c2bc | There are certain thoughts that, no matter what, you have to keep inside. | haruki murakami | ||
| 04997ff | To love someone is to catch your breath whenever he walks in the room. | Margaret George | ||
| 81f0df0 | What is one person's diversion may be another's supreme test. | Margaret George | ||
| 70e6d6d | Consider rereading, how risky it is, especially when the book is one that you loved. Always the chance that it won't hold up, that you might, for whatever reason, not love it as much. When this happens, and to me it happens all the time (and more and more as I get older), the effect is so disheartening that I now open old favorites warily. | Sigrid Nunez | ||
| 9cfb20f | He tries to peel the image from the sticky yellow backing, to show her the next time he sees her, but it clings stubbornly, refusing to detach cleanly from the past. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| e19c278 | With the birth of Akash, in his sudden, perfect presence, Ruma had felt awe for the first time in her life. He still had the power to stagger her at times--simply the fact that he was breathing, that all his organs were in their proper places, that blood flowed quietly and effectively through his small, sturdy limbs. He was her flesh and blood, her mother had told her in the hospital the day Akash was born. Only the words her mother used we.. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 79d9369 | The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| e97b669 | Books are the best means--private, discreet, reliable--of overcoming reality. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 54901e3 | Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear, sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadows of tears, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? They're nothing like ordinary shadows. Nothing at all. They come here from some other, distant world, especially for our hearts. Or maybe not. It struck me then that the tears my shadow was shedding might be the real thing, and the tears that I was shedding were just shadows. You don't get it, I'm sure.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| d368566 | Where the road sloped upward beyond the trees, I sat and looked toward the building where Naoko lived. It was easy to tell which room was hers. All I had to do was find the one window toward the back where a faint light trembled. I focused on that point of light for a long, long time. It made me think of something like the final throb of a soul's dying embers. I wanted to cup my hands over what was left and keep it alive. I went on watching.. | norwegian-wood | Haruki Murakami | |
| 8c88603 | People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned. | people society | Haruki Murakami | |
| 3056f54 | Why are you staring at me?" she'd ask. "'Cause you're pretty," I'd reply. "You're the first one who's ever said that." "I'm the only one who knows," I'd tell her. "And believe me, I know." | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 5d2771e | A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 0f656c0 | The moon had been observing the earth close-up longer than anyone. It must have witnessed all of the phenomena occurring - and all of the acts carried out - on this earth. But the moon remained silent; it told no stories. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 37945f3 | Listen--God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and p.. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 175b647 | That was the rule. Break one of my rules once, and I'm bound to break many more. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 29f98ce | There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| ad980cd | En ese momento, por fin lo capto. En lo mas profundo de si mismo,Tsukuru Tazaki lo comprendio: los corazones humanos no se unen solo mediante la armonia. Se unen, mas bien, herida con herida. Dolor con dolor. Fragilidad con fragilidad. No existe silencio sin un grito desgarrador, no existe perdon sin que se derrame sangre, no existe aceptacion sin pasar por un intenso sentimiento de perdida. Esos son los cimientos de la verdadera armonia. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 83900ac | Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories | Haruki Murakami | ||
| c6afad4 | Where I went in my travels, it's impossible for me to recall. I remember the sights and sounds and smells clearly enough, but the names of the towns are gone, as well as any sense of the order in which I traveled from place to place. | norwegian-wood | Haruki Murakami | |
| bea7093 | The world's crawling with stupid, innocent girls, and I'm just one of them, self-consciously chasing after dreams that will never come true. | dreaming innocence naivete | Haruki Murakami | |
| 43072c1 | But the silence spoke volumes. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 9407276 | This is no honky-tonk parade. 1Q84 is the real world, where a cut draws real blood, where pain is real pain and fear is real fear. The moon in the sky is no paper moon. | Haruki Murakami | ||
| 41fd7e4 | I was dying. Like all the other people who live in this world. | Haruki Murakami |