Sham Sherzad > Sham's Quotes

“this slow dissipation, the gradual abandonment of all expectations, a defeat that had killed everything without a battle.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“One after the other, they were buried under that sky and neither they nor I knew if it was the one under which we'd been born.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“I felt as if this pain would never be appeased, that it had me in its grip for ever, that it would prevent me from devoting myself to anything else, and that I was allowing it to do so. I think that is what they call being consumed with remorse.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“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

“Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. But”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“Whether you want to or not. But the place you return to is always slightly different from the place you left. That’s the rule. It can never be exactly the same.” A”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“A real dreamer must have a mutual trust with time.”
― Yiyun Li

“When we feel haunted, it is the pull of our own home we're experiencing, but a more upsetting possibility is that the past has become homeless, and we are offering it a place to inhabit in the present.”
― Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

“I think of her everywhere. She is everywhere, in every moment, and also she’s in no one moment. She misses every single one of my moments and I’m not sure who that is harder for: me surviving here without her, or her without me, existing wherever she is.”
― Christina Lauren, Love and Other Words

“You broke up with her last night?”
He nods … “You’re the love of my life. I assumed I would get over you eventually, but seeing you yesterday?” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t go home to someone else and pretend to love her with everything I have.”
― Christina Lauren, Love and Other Words

“How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile.

I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose.

"It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow."

"Where do the lead?"

"To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere."

I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall.

"Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“wanted to read between the lines. I wanted to be someone who truly understood the meaning of an author’s words. I wanted to know more people, to be able to engage in deep conversations, and to learn what it was to be human.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“Once you repeat the same word over and over, there comes a time when its meaning fades.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I'd never met and lives I'd never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn't experienced could all be found in those volumes.”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond