Riska (lovunakim) > Riska (lovunakim)'s Quotes

“There was a candor about him I noticed in people whose parents had given them something unconditional and absolute growing up.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I felt like I’d discovered the source of his peculiarly translucent darkness, the air of loneliness and heaviness that hung around him wherever he went.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“This was precisely what made him so nice. He was even considerate to ghosts.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“For the first time, I saw the difference we made by being there for people over the years, in the background of their lives.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I’d broken up with someone I’d met at my pottery studio. It had been quite a major love affair. He was older and single, and I’d gotten caught up in it to the point that I’d even thought about marrying him. In the end we’d gone our separate ways, but I was still hung up on him.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“A man who can get taken in by a move like that will never change. I’m glad you broke up.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“And then, suddenly, time was flowing differently than usual. It didn’t turn back, or even pause. Time simply floated open and started to expand. Time held the two of us in light, inside a space so vast it might have reached the heavens, and turned eternal.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I was also learning that every single person in the world had been hurt by their family at some point. I wasn’t special at all—some people dealt with it well, and some didn’t, but that was the only difference, and either way, we were all nourished and cherished by our families, and at the same time limited and defined by them—that was what it meant to be human, I understood.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I’d started to think maybe this was the life I’d been looking for all along. The kind of life that needed no justification, where I felt calm and grounded, and which I would have been content to continue with forever. Maybe all those people I’d thought treated love so carelessly never had to cling to things because they’d always lived with this kind of safety. And maybe this meant I could now start to become more and more like them. I’d always felt slightly intimidated by the idea of getting married or having children, but maybe it was nothing to be afraid of. I was starting to feel quite optimistic about things to come.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I’d always believed I didn’t take up a lot of space in this world—that it hardly mattered whether I was here or not. When a person left, the people around them got used to their absence. That was true enough. But when I pictured the world without me, and the people I loved living on in it, I couldn’t help but feel like crying.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“my mother disappeared from my life forever.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“When I woke up, for a second, I could still vividly feel the sensation of my arms around my mother’s neck, and my chest against hers. I was overcome by such a deep yearning that I cried as much as I’d ever cried in my life.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“My dad never meant to die and leave us, and my mother didn’t really want to hurt me, and if I’d had my way we’d all have lived together as a family for as long as we wanted.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“I realized that I’d never appreciated how peaceful and precious my life had been before.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“This was what it took, I realized, to be something that survived. Not just constancy, or strength. But—like the ever-flowing river—to engulf everything that came your way and move swiftly on as though it had never been.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Dead-End Memories: Stories

“When we start something new, at first it is very muddy, and clouded. “But soon, it becomes a clear stream, whose flow conducts itself quietly, through spontaneous movements.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“What a comfort it was, I thought, to hear someone put into words something that you were on the verge of grasping.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“Flowers and light, hope and excitement all suddenly seemed like things that were very distant from me, and I was trapped inside a deep, putrid, and bloody darkness.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“but life went on, even at times like this, and it was surprising how easy it was to keep going as though nothing had changed. i found it strange that i could walk down the street and appear normal, just like anyone else. that i could be in complete turmoil inside, and yet my reflection in a shop window could look the same as it ever had.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi

“I just want to rebel completely against everything in society that beat it into me that life would turn out okay if I only did the right things,”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“For all I know . . . my stomach clenched. She might be more desperate than she appeared, and could disappear just like Dad had. Then, in an instant, I’d never be able to be near her again.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“The only thing to do was to work steadily, humbly, and carefully, without trying to complicate things or make them other than what they were.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“I knew, vaguely, that just as the world contained forces that nurtured and strengthened and created things, there were also forces that diminished them. And that even though there were equal amounts of both, the latter could sometimes seem more powerful.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“Dad’s absence in our lives now was so complete it almost felt cruel. In six months’ time, I would be in a place I’d never been before, being stimulated by lots of new experiences, continuing my journey toward the flavors of the next phase of my life.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“the familiar and nostalgic colors and smells, tastes, and places in our memories.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“One of the things you lost sight of when you lived in the city was the sense of how much power an individual had.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“I wondered whether that was the difference between having lost a father and lost a husband.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi: A Novel

“Though men were adults they were children, seemingly complex but as simple as could be; they were utterly unmanageable creatures.”
― Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom: Stories

“Men are an offshoot of humanity as well, but they’re a deviant strain. They’re freaks.”
― Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom: Stories

“Hang on. That doesn’t seem right. I’m pretty sure if I was locked up in a place like that for my whole life and never allowed to leave, I’d end up apathetic too.”
― Izumi Suzuki, Terminal Boredom: Stories