Amy > Amy's Quotes

“It’s the only thing we can do. And not just for our sake, you know? It’s for the other kids, too, even if they don’t realize it. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is we understand it, you and me. We get it. And, like, in that way, living with this weakness, accepting it completely, that’s the greatest strength in the whole world. It’s not just my dad or them or us. We do it for everyone who’s weak everywhere, in the name of actual strength. Everything we take, all of the abuse, we do it to rise above. We do it for the people who know how important it is.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“The paintings here were mystifying. In the reds and greens of the canvases, maidens danced with animals, a goat or something carried a violin in its mouth, and a man and a woman embraced under a gigantic blazing bouquet. This swarm of unrelated images was like a glimpse into a dream. But not a good one. The joy I saw there was ferocious, and the sadness suffocatingly cold. Blues thrown onto the canvas warred with yellows approaching like tornadoes. People gathered round aghast to watch a circus spin to life.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“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

“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

“Even if something happens to us, even if we die and never have to deal with them again, the same thing will happen to someone, somewhere. The same thing. The weak always go through this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because the strong never go away. That’s why you want to pretend to be like them, isn’t it? You want to join them.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Everything that I could see was beautiful. I cried and cried, standing there, surrounded by that beauty, even though I wasn’t standing anywhere. I could hear the sound of my own tears. Everything was beautiful. Not that there was anyone to share it with, anyone to tell. Just the beauty.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morning 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

“For people to actually live by some golden rule, we’d have to be living in a world with no contradictions. But we don’t live in a world like that. No one does. People do what works for them, whatever makes them feel good. But because nobody likes getting stepped on, people start spouting crap about being good to others, being considerate, whatever. Tell me I’m wrong. Everyone does things they don’t want people doing back. Predators eat prey, and school serves no real purpose other than separating the kids who have what it takes from the ones who don’t. That’s the whole point. Everywhere you look, the strong walk all over the weak. Even those fools who think they’ve found the answers by coming up with perfect little sayings about how the world ought to be can’t escape it. Because the real world is everywhere.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Weakness matters, she said. It has real meaning. I was silent, focused on her voice. But know what, she said, if weakness matters, then so does strength. And I don’t mean weak people using the idea of strength to justify their weakness.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“It made me remember the very first time we met up at Whale Park. The kind of evening you can watch descend, the blue sky darkening into night before your eyes. It felt like it had happened in another life, but it had happened that same year, just in a different season”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“All of you have things you value more than anything, right? Photos, or maybe letters. In reality it's all just paper, but we project our memories and emotions onto them, giving them meaning, and that's what makes them more than paper. And out of all those pictures and letters, I bet one or two stand out from the rest, special in a way that no one else would ever understand. That's what it feels like for Kojima to look the way she does. I know it might seem weird, but if photos and letters can mean that much, if you can admit how much they mean to you, is it really so strange that being dirty could do the same thing for someone else? We all see the world in our own way.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Know what's funny about letters? Unless you beg the person you sent them to, you never get to read the letters you wrote again. Isn't that weird? Anyways, I'm taking excellent care of your letters in case you ever want to know what you sounded like when you were fourteen.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“She was alive, and seeing her like that infused me with a loneliness and indescribable longing.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven