Michael > Michael's Quotes

“What can be explained is not poetry.”
― W.B. Yeats

“After he became the Master, the world believed that he could not lose, and he had to believe it himself. Therein was the tragedy.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Master of Go

“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 Book 1

“People who love horror films are people with boring lives... when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films - they act as shock absorbers - and if they disappeared altogether, I bet you'd see a big leap in the number of serial killers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news.”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities, but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“If you look at things from a distance, most anything looks beautiful.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“Good question, but no answer. Good questions never have answers.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn’t keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn’t work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don’t have anything to say.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“The past and the present, might we say, go like this. The future is a maybe. Yet we look back on the darkness that obscures the path that brought us fair, we only come up with another indefinite maybe. The only thing we perceive with any clarity is the present moment, and even that just passes by.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“If you can let it go at not understanding, that's the best anyone could expect.”
― Haruki Murakami, Pinball, 1973

“He had high hopes that the key to unlock the riddle of four people's deaths was hidden on this tape. He'd pushed play fully intending to be satisfied with just a clue, any clue. There can't be any danger, he was thinking. What harm could come from just watching a videotape?”
― Kōji Suzuki, Ring

“I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky.”
― Bill Watterson, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
― David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

“When I first came to New York I had a theory about that -- about survivors. I thought there are people in every generation whose urge to survive is so strong they endanger everyone else. And themselves. They are attractive and vital with their secret purpose. We love and follow them. And they are the enemy.”
― Marc Brandel, Survivor

“I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, "I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be 309 pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.”
― Michael McDowell

“Can you grasp your right fist with your right hand? Obviously not -- your hand can't grasp itself. But there's another, less obvious reason why you can't do it: As soon as you open your right hand to grasp something, you no longer have a right fist.”
― Mark Fabi, Wyrm