null. > null.'s Quotes

“In every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together.”
― Nadine Gordimer, None to Accompany Me

“There are some people, be they black or white, who don't want others to rise above them. They want to be the source of all knowledge and share it piecemeal to others less endowed. That is what's wrong with all these carpenters and men who have a certain knowledge. It is the same with rich people.”
― Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

“To witness is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories we must not appropriate them.”
― Ha Jin, War Trash

“A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“I like to think that you receive my words with pleasure but am content with the more probable event that you do not read them at all. In either case writing is a comfort to me and gives shape to my days.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“I come out on the stage expecting the audience to weep, and instead they burst out laughing.”
― Yukio Mishima

“I write and that way rid myself of me and then at last I can rest.”
― Clarice Lispector

“True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are tow halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love - not truly.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“What does the pilgrim hope for at journey's end? Her beliefs confirmed? Revelation? Or does she secretly wish that the destination never quite materializes, that it keeps receding, ever shrouded in the distance, all the more to feed an inextinguishable devotion?”
― Chang-rae Lee, The Surrendered

“For me, beauty is always retreating from one's grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed. By its subtle, infinitely varied operation, the steel restored the classical balance that the body had begun to lose, reinstating it in its natural form, the form that it should have had all along.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“If there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame.”
― Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea

“Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I'm sick inside.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Privately, I felt that living in that privileged environment, where her emotions ran unchecked, had made her oversensitive and unstable.”
― Minae Mizumura, A True Novel

“Above all, she went on thinking, she understands life because she is not sufficiently intelligent not to understand it.”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Even great men are only truly recognized and honored once they are dead. Why? Because those who praise them need to feel themselves somehow superior to the person praised, they need to feel they are making some concession. ”
― Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“All my adult life I have kept a distance from other people, it has been my way of coping, because I become so incredibly close to others in my thoughts and feelings of course, they only have to look away dismissively for a storm to break inside me.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, A Man in Love

“You find yourself repeating, "They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse, also. That's what I understood. Man will gossip, and kiss up to the bosses, and save his television and ugly fur coat. And people will be the same until the end of time. Always.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

“It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.”
― Adam Haslett, Imagine Me Gone