Mance > Mance's Quotes

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

“Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi

“Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

“Oh, Ichigo. My darling Ichigo. There's so much that I owe you, too. But I'm never paying any of it back—not a smidgen. You're also the one who showed me that growing up might not be such a bad thing after all. Thank you, Ichigo. This is much too embarrassing for me to ever say out loud, but you're the best friend I could ever have.”
― Novala Takemoto, Kamikaze Girls

“For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on.”
― Samuel Beckett, Molloy

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I'm just sad. You were so nice to me when I was having my problems, but now that you're having yours, it seems there's not a thing I can do for you. You're all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity…”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“These women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by loving parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that's great. I wouldn't mind that kind of life. Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“Such a nice escort, Mr. Cobb. So attentive. You should see him sober. I should see him sober. Somebody should see him sober. I mean, just for the record. So it could become a part of history, that brief flashing moment, soon buried in time, but never forgotten—when Larry Cobb was sober.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It's only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.

A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

“The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“I wish to fuck I was your father!” he said angrily. “You wouldn’t go around talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was! It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said: This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.”
― Stephen King

“I always felt there was something wrong with me, even when I was a child, a discomfort with my own being. I had an urge to be mean to people. I was too shy to do it properly but now I know the reasons for the faults in my character. I'm the devil.”
― Rhys Hughes, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

“Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape, I guess, as a container, but there’s nothing inside. I just can’t see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she’ll choose to distance herself from me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“As a rule, rich Southern women did not like to be surpassed in either need or beauty. The exception was with their daughters. Daughters of the South were to their mothers what tributaries were to the main rivers they flowed into: their source of immovable strength.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Peach Keeper