"The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this."
— Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude)

"In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life"
— Paul Auster

"The pictures do not lie, but neither do they tell the whole story. They are merely a record of time passing, the outward evidence."
— Paul Auster (Travels in the Scriptorium: A Novel)

"Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who's in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It's like stepping back inside a room you have fond memories of, one you haven't seen in a long time."
— Haruki Murakami

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

An you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."
— Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)

"Only the Dead stay seventeen forever."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all."
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people.
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)

"Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?"
— Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle)

"Not that we were incompatible: we just had nothing to talk about."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Mediocrity is like a spot on your shirt, it never comes off."
— Haruki Murakami (Dance, Dance, Dance)

""I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make."
"
— Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes: Stories)

"With each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating."
— Haruki Murakami

"Time is the longest distance between two places"
— Tennessee Williams

"When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone"
— Tennessee Williams

"Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."
— Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)

"You said, 'They’re harmless dreamers and they’re loved by the people.' 'What,' I asked you, 'is harmless about a dreamer, and what,' I asked you, 'is harmless about the love of the people? Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams."
— Tennessee Williams

"Success and failure are equally disastrous."
— Tennessee Williams

"Every time you come in yelling that God damn "Rise and Shine!" "Rise and Shine!" I say to myself, "How lucky dead people are!""
— Tennessee Williams

"For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . ."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"Why, man alive, Laura! Just look about you a little. What do you see? A world full of common people! All of 'em born and all of em' going to die! Which of them has one-tenth of your good points! Or mine! Or anyone else's, as far as that goes - gosh! Everybody excels in some one thing. Some in many!"
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"You are the only young man that I know of who ignores the fact that the future becomes the present, the present the past, and the past turns into everlasting regret if you don't plan for it."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"All pretty girls are a trap, a pretty trap, and men expect them to be."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistc. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for emmory is seated predominantely in the heart."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"In memory, everything seems to happen to music."
— Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie)

"Without music, life would be a mistake."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Faith: not wanting to know what the truth is."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In truth,there was only one christian and he died on the cross."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche