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“Physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an attempt by an atom to understand itself.”
― Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds: A Journey through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos

“This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the first step toward becoming a domestic animal.”
― Ryū Murakami, 69

“Squeezed against each other in the heavy heat, they were silent...looking toward the home that was expecting them--quiet, perspiring, resigned to this existence divided among a soulless job, long trips coming and going in an uncomfortable trolley, and at the end an abrupt sleep. On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them. Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poverty. But now heat and boredom and fatigue were showing him their curse, the curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.”
― Albert Camus, The First Man

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year. I feel I know you so well that I couldn't have known you better if we'd been friends for twenty years. You won't fail me, will you? Only two minutes, and you've made me happy forever. Yes, happy. Who knows, perhaps you've reconciled me with myself, resolved all my doubts.

When I woke up it seemed to me that some snatch of a tune I had known for a long time, I had heard somewhere before but had forgotten, a melody of great sweetness, was coming back to me now. It seemed to me that it had been trying to emerge from my soul all my life, and only now-

If and when you fall in love, may you be happy with her. I don't need to wish her anything, for she'll be happy with you. May your sky always be clear, may your dear smile always be bright and happy, and may you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

“Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Don't you go and dump reality on us like a garbage truck.”
― Etgar Keret, פתאום דפיקה בדלת

“My son loves the whores who visit our upstairs neighbor. “What animal are you?” he asks them when he bumps into them on the stairs. “Today I’m a mouse, a quick and slippery mouse.” And they get it right away, and throw out the name of an animal: an elephant, a bear, a butterfly. Each whore and her animal. It’s strange, because with other people, when he asks them about the animals, they simply don’t catch on. But the whores just go along with it.”
― Etgar Keret, פתאום דפיקה בדלת

“Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

“I don't have the strength to keep writing this. To go on living with this feeling is painful beyond description. Isn't there someone kind enough to strangle me in my sleep?”
― Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Rashōmon and Seventeen Other Stories

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“No one likes crying, but tears water our souls.”
― Xinran, Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet

“I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“It suddenly occurred to me that every move on the chessboard is old and has been played by somebody at some time. Maybe our own history has been played out by somebody at some time, and we just move our pieces about in the same moves to strike in the same way as people have always done.”
― Karel Čapek, War with the Newts

“We make assumptions about how our lives are being charted without knowing that we’re even making these assumptions—which is the beauty of assumptions: they anchor us without the slightest clue that what we’re doing is trusting that nothing changes. We believe that the street we live on will remain the same and bear its name forever. We believe that our friends will stay our friends, and that those we love we’ll love forever. We trust and, by dint of trusting, forget we trusted.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“It was Brian's blood, and for some reason I knew it was pure. No other man I'd held in my arms -and now, not even I- had blood this pure.”
― Scott Heim, Mysterious Skin: A Novel

“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.”
― Roger Ebert

“Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“ALICE
She drank from a bottle called DRINK ME
And she grew so tall,
She ate from a plate called TASTE ME
And down she shrank so small.
And so she changed, while other folks
Never tried nothin' at all.”
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends

“Stay gold, Ponyboy. Stay gold . . .” The pillow seemed to sink a little, and Johnny died.”
― S.E. Hinton, The Outsiders

“He was dead tired, thanks to which, whatever emotions he might have had, simply came and went without gaining a foothold. The Rat began to relax and lay down his empty head on the mingled sounds of the waves and the deejay until sleep crept over him.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“The fact that no one knows where I am is my only happiness. If only I could prolong this forever! It would be far more just than death. I am empty and futile in every corner of my being, even in my unhappiness.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet.”
― Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds

“solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person’s heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside. I think in my own way I’m aware of this danger—probably through experience—and that’s why I’ve had to constantly keep my body in motion, in some cases pushing myself to the limit, in order to heal the loneliness I feel inside and to put it in perspective. Not so much as an intentional act, but as an instinctive reaction.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“They've done it before and they'll do it again and when they do it -- seems that only the children weep. Good night.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird