Iris > Iris's Quotes

“It isn't anything, but it's so beautiful that I could cry.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Because we’re always in pain, we know exactly what it means to hurt somebody else.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Listen, if there is a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“When I start to feel emotional about something, I can't tell if I'm actually feeling that way. What if it's just something somebody wrote in a book? Or maybe a line or a performance from some movie... Either way, I get this feeling like I'm quoting somebody else's work.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Why does the night have to be so beautiful? As I walk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Without love and trust, resentment is the only thing that’s left.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“I was so scared of being hurt that I'd done nothing. I was so scared of failing, of being hurt, that I choose nothing. I did nothing.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Memory's funny, isn't it? We remember some things out of nowhere, but so much of what happens, we never think about again.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive? I made myself crazy, tossing and turning, hyperventilat- ing. Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morn- ing never comes, you sleep forever. That must be what death is like. When someone dies, they don’t even know they’re dead. Because they never see it happen, nobody ever really dies. This hit me like a sucker punch.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“At first, suicide was just a word, a vague idea separate from reality. It pointed at a way that other people chose to die, people I didn't even know. But once the word became my own, it took on the strangest shape. I could feel it growing deep inside of me. Suicide wasn't something that happened to strangers. I could make it happen, if I wanted to.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven