Raya > Raya's Quotes

“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.”
― Martin Heidegger

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
― Albert Camus

“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.

And 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

“It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“Jean-Marc watched the sand-yachts, and when he saw one heading at racing-car speed for Chantal, he frowned. An old man lay in the thing like an astro­naut in a rocket. Flat on his back like that, the man can’t see anything ahead of him! Is Chantal vigilant enough to keep clear? He railed against her, against her overly offhand nature, and quickened his pace.

She turned half-way around. But she cannot have seen Jean-Marc, for her demeanour was still slow, the demeanour of a woman deep in thought and walking without looking about her. He would like to shout to her to stop being so distracted, to pay attention to those idiotic vehicles running all over the beach. Suddenly he imagines her body crushed by the sand-yacht, sprawled on the sand, she is bleeding, the sand-yacht is disappearing down the beach and he sees himself dash towards her. He is so upset by the image that he really does start shouting Chantal’s name; the wind is strong, the beach enormous, and no one can hear his voice, so he can give over to that sort of sentimental theatrics and, with tears in his eyes, shout out his anguish for her; his face clenched in a grimace of weeping, for a few seconds he is living through the horror of her death.

Then, himself astounded by that curious spasm of hysteria, he saw her, in the distance, still strolling nonchalantly, peaceable, calm, pretty, infinitely touch­ing, and he grinned at the comedy of bereavement he’d just played out, smiled about it without self-reproach, because Chantal’s death has been with him ever since he began to love her.”
― Milan Kundera

“How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?

You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more”
― Milan Kundera, Identity

“Humans are the only animal that blushes, laughs, has religion, wages war, and kisses with lips. So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are. And the more you wage war.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I feel too much. That's what's going on.' 'Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?' 'My insides don't match up with my outsides.' 'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?' 'I don't know. I'm only me.' 'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.' 'But it's worse for me.' 'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.' 'Probably. But it really is worse for me.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“You can't love anything more than something you miss.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“There's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I liked chess, I asked her if she liked fallen trees, she went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Sometimes people who seem good end up being not as good as you might have hoped, you know?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“We talked about nothing in particular, but it felt like we were talking about the most important things...”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I have so much to say to you. I want to begin at the beginning, because that is what you deserve. I want to tell you everything, without leaving out a single detail. But where is the beginning? And what is everything?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Darling,
You asked me to write you a letter, so I am writing you a letter. I do not know why I am writing you this letter, or what this letter is supposed to be about, but I am writing it nonetheless, because I love you very much and trust that you have some good purpose for having me write this letter. I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.
Your father”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“It was terrible. All of the things we couldn't share. The room was filled with conversations we weren't having.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“No matter how much I feel, I’m not going to let it out. If I have to cry, I’m gonna cry on the inside. If I have to bleed, I’ll bruise. If my heart starts going crazy, I’m not gonna tell everyone in the world about it. It doesn’t help anything. It just makes everyone’s life worse.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“...people with nothing to declare carry the most.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close