佳韦 吴 > 佳韦's Quotes

“I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“I realize now that the reality of things is not something you convey to people but something you make.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes

“We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“I'm in no position to hand down any advice," he said, "but there's a rule I follow when I don't know what to do."

"A rule?"

"If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule. Whenever I run into a wall I follow that rule, and it always works out. Even if it's hard going at the time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“These days I just can't seem to say what I mean,' she said. 'I just can't. Every time I try to say something, it misses the point. Either that or I end up saying the opposite of what I mean. The more I try to get it right the more mixed up it gets. Sometimes I can't even remember what I was trying to say in the first place. It's like my body's split in two and one of me is chasing the other me around a big pillar. We're running circles around it. The other me has the right words, but I can never catch her...Do you know what I'm trying to say?' 'Everybody has that kind of feeling sometimes,' I said. 'You can't express yourself the way you want to, and it annoys you.' Obviously this wasn't what she wanted to hear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“When it's raining like this," said Naoko, "it feels as if we're the only ones in the world. I wish it would just keep raining so the three of us could stay together.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I don't think jealousy has much of a connection with real, objective conditions. Like if you're fortunate you're not jealous, but if life hasn't blessed you, you are jealous. Jealousy doesn't work that way. It's more like a tumor secretly growing inside us that gets bigger and bigger, beyond all reason. Even if you find out it's there, there's nothing you can do to stop it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman: 24 Stories

“Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it's way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are. They mate just once a year. One time in a whole year. There is no such thing as a lasting male-female bond in their world. One male polar bear and one female polar bear meet by sheer chance somewhere in the frozen vastness, and they mate. It doesn't take long. And once they are finished, the male runs away from the female as if he is frightened to death: he runs from the place where they have mated. He never looks back - literally. The rest of the year he lives in deep solitude. Mutual communications - the touching of two hearts - do not exist for them. So, that is the story of polar bears - or at least it is what my employer told me about them.'

How very strange.'

Yes, it is strange. I remember asking my employer, ' Then what do polar bears exist for?' ' Yes, exactly,' he said with a big smile. 'Then what do we exist for?”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe and Aloysius in a good temper...”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, and the journey is always towards the other soul.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”
― Henry James

“Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
― Henry James

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined.”
― Henry James

“I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand; I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.”
― Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady