- “A deserted library in the morning - there's something about it that really gets to me. All possible words and ideas are there, resting peacefully.” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)
- "I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
- "I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
- "I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
- "For you, a thousand times over." (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner)
- "As I rose from the bed, the sun broke below the heaving clouds: a rare, golden light drenching, saturating the town. Always these deft elemental touches move me: light breaking through clouds, rain spattering on roofs, pink sunsets." (Peter Goldsworthy, Mastro)
- "Never again will time move as slowly as it did then, and never again would there be so much to be discovered, to be touched and tasted for the first time. And now it was too late: once we begin to sense our childhoods, we are no longer children. And decisions have been made - by omission, neglect, inertia - that cannot be unmade." (Maestro, Peter Goldsworthy)
- “Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors.” (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner)
- "He says this is war. There is no shame in war. Tell him he's wrong. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace.” (Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner)
- “A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.” (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
- “Chance encounters are what keep us going.” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)
- “Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)
- “Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
- “For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.” (Thomas Moore, Utopia)
- “Happiness is the longing for repetition." (Milan Kundera)
- “Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test, consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” (Milan Kundera)
- “Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world” (Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things)
- “I want you to remember me. If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)
- “If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” (Yann Martel, Life of Pi)
- “If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts....."If you eat fish in a dream, does it count?" Does it mean you've eaten fish?” (Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things)
- “If you stumble about believability, what are you living for? Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?” (Yann Martel, Life of Pi)
- “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)
- “Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.” (Yann Martel, Life of Pi)
- “Our responsibility begins with our imagination.” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)
- “Perhaps most people in the world aren’t trying to be free, Kafka. They just think they are. It’s all an illusion. If they really were set free, most people would be in a real pickle. You’d better remember that. People actually prefer not being free.” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)
- “Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen or churches or organisations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy.” (Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans)
- “Some days he walked along the banks of the river that smelled of shit and pesticides bought with World Bank loans.” (Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things)
- “That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” (Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things)
- “The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?” (Yann Martel, Life of Pi)
- “The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people." (Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves)
- “To define is to limit.” (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
- “To laugh is to live profoundly.” (Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
- “Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
- “Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.” (Milan Kundera)
- In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangment and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.” (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore )
feb 27 2013 ∞
nov 1 2014 +
nov 1 2014 +