Becky > Becky's Quotes

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there's salvation in life. Even if you can't get together with that person.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

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

“In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other. The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, transparent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness, melted into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly when a light out in the mountains shone in the centre of the girl's face, Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
― Stephen King, The Waste Lands

“Seeing an Earl as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one's face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.”
― Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

“Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are."
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Where are the deputies?'
'On their way up to the first-aid post.'
'What happened to them?'
'I did.”
― Lee Child, Nothing to Lose

“All I know is a door into the dark”
― Seamus Heaney

“In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.”
― Seamus Heaney, Beowulf

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.”
― David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn't leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.”
― Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney

“The house was an immense place, isolated in a great wooded area. The building and the trees seemed wet, glistening dimly in the grey morning light that was much like the light of midday of Anthea. It was refreshing to his over-sensitive eyes. He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people.....”
― Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth

“Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark. See how the light needs shadows. Look: wrinkles spread like mildew over our peachy sheen; beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat-by-beat, varicose veins worm through plucked calves; torsos and breasts fatten and sag...as last year's song hurtles into next year's song and the year after that, and the dancers' hairstyles frost, wither, and fall in chemotherapeutic tufts; cancer spatters inside this tarry lung, in that ageing pancreas, in this aching bollock; DNA frays like wool, and down we tumble; a fall on the stairs, a heart-attack, a stroke; not dancing but twitching...They knew it in the Middle Ages. Life is a terminal illness.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“.....it's hard to describe a psychosoteric battle at close quarters..... Think of those tennis-ball firing machines, but loaded with hand-grenades trapped in a shipping container, on a ship caught in a force-ten gale.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“He was impressed with his father's fiction and noticed certain stylistic tics that he shared, and figured it was genetic. Why would genes determine only physical traits, eye color and left-handedness? Why not other, more subtle, bodiless proclivities such as a love of the semicolon and a propensity to string modifying clauses ad infinitum?”
― David Duchovny, Bucky F*cking Dent

“He wanted to argue like this forever. This was better than nothing. There was no exhausting his anger at his father, and every word, however well intentioned or intentionally barbed, was a pull at a scab on his bloody heart. It was too late for any of this. There could ultimately be no healing. Marty had terminal cancer, and so did the two men have a cancer between them. They were terminal together, as father and son. They remained, momentarily exhausted, but it was really only that quiet between lightning and thunder as sound lags behind speed. The lightning had cracked the ground already, you just hadn't heard it yet.”
― David Duchovny, Bucky F*cking Dent

“As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

“Now, even more than the evening before, he could think of no one with whom to compare her. She had become absolute, beyond comparison. She had become decision and fate.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes

“They drove farther north like that. In perfect loving antagonism. It occurred to Ted that maybe Marty was like all the red and gold leaves he saw burning on the trees. In nature, it seems, things reached their most vibrant and beautiful right at the point of death, flaming out with all they had—why not natural man? His father was red, green, yellow, and gold, like a beautiful bird falling from the sky. Parodoxical undressing again.”
― David Duchovny, Bucky F*cking Dent

“In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes

“Now, as they pressured perfect footprints into the snow that had been accumulating all day, his father took Harry's hand.
"Heshele, how are you?"
"OK, I guess."
"Are you very sad?"
"I don't know. I know I should be. But what does it mean to be sad?"
His father stopped. He cupped his free hand to let the snow gather. It quickly turned from an inviting white coating to black-specked gray water.
"Sadness is in my hand. In a second, a thing of beauty becomes dirty water; innocence leaves a child's eyes; he who strived for immortality lies forgotten under weeds. Sad is missing the love that death has sealed in the ground or that life has denied life to."
"Then I'm sad. When you took my hand, I remembered how he took my hand when we went to the pier to fish. And I thought: That will never happen again. And then I thought: Up until now I never understood the word never, and there was a lump in my throat.”
― Amram Ducovny, Coney

“Below the zelkova tree time had stopped. At the foot of a little pine tree in its shadow, the most important of gems lay sleeping. Perhaps a window with a distant view of that place would allow us to yield to the natural process of forgetting.”
― Takashi Hiraide, The Guest Cat

“Oh, that magic DID prevail, I thought. For then it would truly be that best of all worlds so sought after by humanoids across all space and time. A release from needed knowledge, from the constant search for the why and wherefore of it all. How simple life would be if that were so - no 'Constant H', no law of inverse squares - to be surrounded forever by the world of childhood with its ogres, its fairies, its sleeping princesses, and its never-never lands.....”
― Arthur H. Landis, A World Called Camelot

“I get it. Having had Satoru take me in as his cat, I think I felt as lucky as he did. Strays, by definition, have been abandoned or left behind, but Satoru rescued me when I broke my leg. He made me the happiest cat on earth. I'll always remember those five years we had together. And I'll forever go by the name Nana, the name that - let's face it - is pretty unusual for a male cat. The town where Satoru grew up, too, I would remember that. And the green seedlings swaying in the fields. The sea, with its frighteningly loud roar. Mount Fuji, looming over us. How cosy it felt on top of that boxy TV. That wonderful lady cat, Momo. That nervy but earnest hound, Toramaru. That huge white ferry, which swallowed up cars into its stomach. The dogs in the pet holding area, wagging their tails at Satoru. That foul-mouthed chinchilla telling me Guddo rakku! The land in Hokkaido stretching out forever. Those vibrant purple and yellow flowers by the side of the road. The field of pampas grass like an ocean. The horses chomping on grass. The bright-red berries on the mountain-ash trees. The shades of red on the mountain ash that Satoru taught me. The stands of slender white birch. The graveyard, with its wide-open vista. The bouquet of flowers in rainbow colours. The white heart-shaped bottom of the deer. That huge, huge, huge double rainbow growing out of the ground. I would remember these for the rest of my life. And Kosuke, and Yoshimine, and Sugi and Chikako. And above all, the one who brought up Satoru and made it possible for us to meet - Noriko. Could anyone be happier than this?”
― Hiro Arikawa, Nana Du Ký

“There was one idea that might have turned out pretty interesting. Hunter S. Thompson had written a book called Songs of the Doomed, and in the first few pages he mentions sitting around and listening to something off The Caution Horses, then he mentions the band later on in there, too. He's always been one of our favourite wackos, so we decided to call him up and see if we could maybe work on something together. It took a while to get him on the phone, because he'd wake up at midnight, stay up all night, drinking and watching sports, then sleep through the day. But we ended up having a bunch of weird phone conversations with him. His idea was we'd go to his ranch out in Colorado, get a camera crew, no script and 'just go crazy, man!' That didn't really fit what we had in mind; we wanted a little more structure than that. Going crazy isn't what we do. But he wasn't into that, at all. He didnt want to write anything, he just wanted this wacked-out thing. Eventually he got really pissed off for some reason. He sent us a fax, saying 'If you guys show up here, you're going home in body bags!' What did we do to piss him off that much?”
― Dave Bowler, Music is the Drug

“There was an accident with a contraceptive and a time machine. Now concentrate!”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe