wen > wen's Quotes

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“People are willing to accept the pain and suffering of others, limitless amounts of it, as long as it helps them to keep on believing in whatever it is that they want to believe. Love, meaning, doesn’t matter.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I wasn't particularly afraid of death itself. As Shakespeare said, die this year and you don't have to die the next.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow, washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky?”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“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

“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“...things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body - a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. (2)”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“It is always consoling to think of suicide;
it's what gets one through many a bad night.”
― Gillian Flynn, Dark Places

“Suicide is a form of murder - premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“When you’re sad you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost

“Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“I have this strange feeling that I'm not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays

“I know what "nothing" means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays