Bryan Kurniawan > Bryan's Quotes

“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Only people who have been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Elliot calls 'hollow men'. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“While one may lose much because of avarice, nothing was ever accomplished by abstinence.”
― Isuna Hasekura, Spice & Wolf, Vol. 01

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“When we are young,” Jasnah said, “we want simple answers. There is no greater indication of youth, perhaps, than the desire for everything to be as it should. As it has ever been.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“I suppose I’m saying Josie and I will always be together at some level, some deeper one, even if we go out there and don’t see each other any more. I can’t speak for her. But once I’m out there, I know I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her. At least like the Josie I once knew. So it wasn’t ever a deception, Klara. Whoever that was you were dealing with back then, if they could see right into my heart, and right into Josie’s, they’d know you weren’t trying to pull some fast one.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

“I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”
― Anne Frank

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'" she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn't surprise me if she wrote it down. "So what does that really mean? In simple terms."
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
"I think it means," I say, "that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore