Avery > Avery's Quotes

“And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Malevolence is born of negative feelings like loneliness and sadness and anger. It comes from an emptiness inside you that feels as if it's been carved out with a knife, an emptiness you're left with when something very important has been taken away from you”
― Ryu Murakami

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Americans . . . are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle

“The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"

"You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“There are people you remember and people you dream of.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón

“I am the way into the city of woe,
I am the way into eternal pain,
I am the way to go among the lost.

Justice caused my high architect to move,
Divine omnipotence created me,
The highest wisdom, and the primal love.

Before me there were no created things
But those that last forever—as do I.
Abandon all hope you who enter here.”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“Parents, teachers, government - they all teach you how to live the dreary, deadening life of a slave, but nobody teaches you how to live normally.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“... The type of loneliness where you need to keep struggling to accept a situation is fundamentally different than the sort you know you'll get through if you just hang in there”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Lady #1, Maki, had never once given any thought to what was really right for her in her life, simply believing that if she surrounded herself with super-exclusive things, she'd become a super-exclusive person.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“When you're a kid, getting lost isn't just an event or a situation, it's like a career move. You get this thrill of anxiety and fear and a feeling that you've done something that can never be undone.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“Death’s shadow only fades little by little as time passes. There will never be more than a thin glass barrier between your present and the wreckage of your past”
― Weihui Zhou, Shanghai Baby

“She believes in these words: suck dry the juice of life like a leech, including its secret happiness and hurt, spontaneous passion and eternal longing.”
― Hui Wei, Shanghai Baby

“Fear of loneliness is what teaches us to love,”
― Hui Wei, Shanghai Baby

“I think too much, and 99.9 per cent of men don’t want to get involved with a woman who thinks too much.”
― Hui Wei, Shanghai Baby

“What I saw was a face which couldn’t be called pretty, but one also not easily forgotten: pointed features, oblique eyebrows, pale skin with slightly enlarged pores, and expensive lipstick that threatened to drip off her lips. Once beautiful, but now a dream in which willow branches have withered, clouds have scattered and drifting petals have fallen to the ground. A face that has been corroded by pleasure, impetuosity and dreams, each of which has left scars on it, leaving it sharp yet worn, capable of hurting, yet vulnerable as well.”
― Hui Wei, Shanghai Baby

“Death is the expression of exhaustion, a solution arrived at rationally once one has known the deepest depths of tiredness.”
― Hui Wei, Shanghai Baby

“In my novel, a couple hold each other close as a raging fire spreads through their room. They know they can’t leave. Fire has sealed off all windows and corridors, leaving them only one thing to do: make love madly in the heart of the blaze.”
― Hui Wei, Shanghai Baby

“I can’t imagine myself falling for a man who can’t cite ten proverbs, five philosophical allusions, and the names of three composers).”
― Anonymous

“How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?”
― Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

“Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“If only more people in life said, This is what I must have.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who’d quietly started weeping for reasons she didn’t understand?”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“Certainly a rope and pulley would have worked best. But not everybody around here went to Kim Il Sung University.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“It wasn’t that I didn’t know anyone’s phone number—I didn’t—it was that only at this moment did I realize I had no one to call. There wasn’t a woman, a colleague, or even a relative that I had to contact. Didn’t I have a single friend?”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“There is a talk that every father has with his son in which he brings the child to understand that there are ways we must act, things we must say, but inside, we are still us, we are family.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“It’s hard to imagine losing a family, to have someone you love just disappear like that.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“What happened?” Buc asked him. “I told her the truth about something,” Ga answered. “You’ve got to stop doing that,” Buc said. “It’s bad for people’s health.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

“He had been the person who took. He’d been the one who was taken. And he’d been the one left behind. Next he would find out what it was like to be all three at once.”
― Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son