Steve > Steve's Quotes

“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“This piece of land was our original sin, except we had found no baptismal rite to expunge it from our lives. That green-purple field of new cane was rooted in rib cage and eye socket. But what of the others whose lives had begun here and ended in other places? The ones who became prostitutes in cribs on Hopkins Street in New Iberia and Jane’s Alley in New Orleans, sliced their hands open with oyster knives, laid bare their shin bones with the cane sickle, learned the twelve-string blues on the Red Hat gang and in the camps at Angola with Leadbelly and Hogman Matthew Maxey, were virtually cooked alive in the castiron sweatboxes of Camp A, and rode Jim Crow trains North, as in a biblical exodus, to southside Chicago and the magic of 1925 Harlem, where they filled the air with the music of the South and the smell of cornbread and greens and pork chops fixed in sweet potatoes, as though they were still willing to forgive if we would only acknowledge their capacity for forgiveness. Tolstoy asked how much land did a man need. Just enough to let him feel the pull of the earth on his ankles and the claim it lays on the quick as well as the dead.”
― James Lee Burke, Burning Angel

“Researching Dad’s life, I’ve made contact with his old colleagues and friends and others we knew—people like Joyce Jenkins of Poetry Flash; and Jimmy Siegel, who owns Distractions; and Sean, the smiling Southerner who worked at Coffee Tea & Spice. Speaking with them, I got to hear three powerful words, three words I didn’t know I so badly needed to hear: “I remember you.” With these words, the lights switch on. The music plays. The carousel starts up again and those glittery and colorful horses move up and down and around, delighting my every sense. For a moment, I get to be a child again. I feel wholly me.”
― Alysia Abbott, Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

“Her smile steps offstage for a moment, then does an encore, all while I’m dealing with my blushing face.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,’” she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn’t surprise me if she wrote it down. “So what does that really mean? In simple terms.” I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently. “I think it means,” I say, “that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.” She mulls that over for a while, then slowly brings her hands together on top of the table and rests them there lightly. “I think you’re right about that—that chance encounters keep us going.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“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

“Oshima reaches out and lays a hand on my knee in a totally natural gesture. “Kafka, 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

“That depends,” Oshima says. “Sometimes it is. But irony deepens a person, helps them mature. It’s the entrance to salvation on a higher plane, to a place where you can find a more universal kind of hope. That’s why people enjoy reading Greek tragedies even now, why they’re considered prototypical classics. I’m repeating myself, but everything in life is metaphor. People don’t usually kill their father and sleep with their mother, right? In other words, we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“But In dreams begin responsibilities, right?” Oshima nods. “Yeats.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“So you’re saying Miss Saeki maybe found those words in some other space—like in dreams?” “Most great poetry is like that. If the words can’t create a prophetic tunnel connecting them to the reader, then the whole thing no longer functions as a poem.” “But plenty of poems only pretend to do that.” “Right. It’s a kind of trick, and as long as you know that it isn’t hard. As long as you use some symbolic-sounding words, the whole thing looks like a poem of sorts.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Hoshino looked up, mouth half open, and gazed at her face. “What’s that?” “Henri Bergson,” she replied, licking the semen from the tip of his penis. “Mame mo memelay.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“My grandpa used to always tell me that my bad point was running off with people I didn’t know without thinking what I was doing. I guess I must have always done that. The child’s the father of the man, like they say.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“We all die and disappear, but that’s because the mechanism of the world itself is built on destruction and loss.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all,”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there. The night Kizuki died, however, I lost the ability to see death (and life) in such simple terms. Death was not the opposite of life. It was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. When it took the seventeen-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“The sky was a fresh-swept blue, with only a trace of white cloud clinging to the dome of heaven like a thin streak of test paint.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“He knew Mozart inside out, the way a country boy knows his mountain trails.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: “Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.” By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Midori responded with a long, long silence—the silence of all the misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“But everything had passed with the flow of time. At an almost unbelievable pace. What had once been a violent, panting flood of emotion had suddenly withdrawn, leaving behind a heap of what felt like meaningless old dreams.”
― Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

“I took a long look at my reflection in the window. My eyes were a bit hollow with fever. I could live with that. And my jaw was dark with five o’clock (five thirty, actually) shadow. I could live with that too. The problem was that the face I saw wasn’t my face at all. It was the face of the twenty-four-year-old guy you sometimes sit across from on the train. My face and my soul were lifeless shells, of no significance to anyone. My soul passes someone else’s on the street. Hey, it says. Hey, the other responds. Nothing more. Neither waves. Neither looks back. If I stuck gardenias in my ears and flippers on my hands some people might stop and turn around. But that would be it. Three steps more and they would already have forgotten me. Their eyes saw nothing, not a damn thing. And mine were no different. I felt empty. Maybe I had nothing left to give.”
― Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

“On any given day, something can come along and steal our hearts. It may be any old thing: a rosebud, a lost cap, a favorite sweater from childhood, an old Gene Pitney record. A miscellany of trivia with no home to call their own. Lingering for two or three days, that something soon disappears, returning to the darkness. There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Wind/Pinball: Two Novels

“I replaced the receiver. What did she mean, she got the picture? I didn’t get the picture, but then again, there are lots of things I don’t know anything about. Age certainly hasn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“The waiting room, like most waiting rooms, was deserted and unremarkable. The benches were miserably uncomfortable, the ashtrays swollen with waterlogged cigarette butts, the air stale. On the walls were travel posters and most-wanted lists. The only other people there were an old man wearing a camel-color sweater and a mother with her four-year-old son. The old man sat glued in position, poring through a literary magazine. He turned the pages as slowly as if he were peeling away adhesive tape. Fifteen minutes from one page to the next. The mother and child looked like a couple whose marriage was on the rocks.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“The conductor was so totally without expression he could have pulled off a bank robbery without covering his face.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“Made me grow up real fast.” “Everybody has to grow up.” “You’re right there. I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time,” said Gotanda, peering into my face. “But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“Dance, the Sheep Man said. Dance in tip-top form. Dance so it all keeps spinning.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“A moment later Jean was squeezing past those brutes, into the familiar smells of a busy tavern at an hour closer to dawn than dinner. Sweat, scalded meat, puke, blood, smoke, and a dozen kinds of bad ale and wine: the bouquet of the civilized nightlife.”
― Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies

“She had a face of snow, cut from that white cool marble that makes the finest Irish women; a long swan neck, a generous if quivering mouth, and eyes a soft and luminous green. So beautiful were those eyes, and her profile against the blown tree branches, that something in me turned, agonized, and died. I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return.”
― Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales