Li > Li's Quotes

“We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“We feel ever obliged by everday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“He should have had more faith in himself rather than give in to his weaker qualities, in particular his overeagerness to please and aversion to conflict and a lifelong infatuation with hope, which had him dreaming more than doing”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“Isn’t it better that we send them off once and for all beneath the glow of carnival lights, with the taste of treats on our tongues, rather than invite the acrid tang of doubt, and undue longing, and the heart-stab of a freshly sundered bond?”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

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

“If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want is the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it. The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Kafka, in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I know I'm a little different from everyone else, but I'm still human being. That's what I'd like you to realize. I'm just a regular person, not some monster. I feel the same things everyone else does, act the same way. Sometimes, though, that small difference feels like an abyss. But I guess there's not much I can do about it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“If we reverse the outer shell and the essence--in other words, consider the outer shell the essence and the essence only the shell--our lives might be a whole lot easier to understand.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Things change every day, Mr Nakata. With each new dawn it's not the same world as the day before. And you're not the same person you were, either.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“You know I love you. You're the only one."

"She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“As a species we're doomed by hope, then?

You could call it hope. That, or desperation.

But we're doomed without hope, as well, said Jimmy.

Only as individuals, said Crake cheerfully.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“He's humanoid, he's hominid, he's an aberration, he's abominable; he'd be legendary, if there were anyone left to relate legends.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say. Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

“For a while" is a phrase whose length can't be measured.At least by the person who's waiting.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward. Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“I always feel as if I'm struggling to become someone else. As if I'm trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I suppose it's part of growing up, yet it's also an attempt to re-invent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself - as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What's missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I'm still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as I'll come to defining myself.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.”
― Haruki Murakami , South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys.”
― Haruki Murakami

“This was the second stage in my life, a step in my personal evolution--abandoning the idea of being different, and settling for normal... Gradually I drew nearer to the world, and the world drew nearer to me.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“Little by little, I would get snared by the world out there. This was the first step; first I say yes to this, then later on it'll be something else.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun