Beatriz Baptista > Recent Status Updates

“It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our own deformities.”

I told her: "Just a few hundred guys in grubby rooms, drinking and wanking."
"Does that include you?"
"It includes every man on the face of the earth," I explained. "Girls have periods and boys wank. Everybody."

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

“I like to read my favourites again and again. Back then it was Truman Capote, John Updike, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler (…). They liked Kazumi Takahashi, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, or contemporary French novelists (…)”

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 17-year-old Kizuki that night in May, death took me as well.

Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. (…) Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life.”

“Once the plane was on the ground, soft music began to flow from the ceiling speakers: a sweet orchestral cover version of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood".”

“Mal o aparelho completou a aterragem, apagaram-se os sinais luminosos que indicavam a proibição de fumar. Debitada pelos altifalantes, começou a soar baixinho a música de fundo, »Norwegian Wood, dos Beatles, numa versão orquestral delicodoce.”

“The calendar separates today from yesterday and tomorrow, but in life there is no distinguishing past, present, and future. We all have an enormity of time, too big for one person to deal with, and we live, and we die-“

“The only thing I was guilty of was being unable to adjust. I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to. The pain of life, the sadness… and the joy…”

“To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone.”

“Redouté, the man who painted these roses, died over a hundred seventy years ago. And the rose bushes that he studied are more than likely no longer living either. But once, somewhere, those roses were in bloom. And once, somewhere, a painter lived. And now, through these pieces of paper divorced from the reality of the past, like fantastical flowers that do not exist in our world, these roses bloom.”

"No matter how we grieve, the
dead will not return.“

"Well, I think he's right about some things, certainly. But being right isn't all there is to life."

“To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen.”

“It was over.
It was all over, but I was alive...
I had to live to mourn my son.
To live ...”

“My whole body was on guard against my emotions. I could not bear it, no more, I could not bear to be sad, to suffer, to be angry-“

“I'm trying, I thought.
Set me free from trying, I thought.
I'd been trying since I heard about Koichi's death.
Until then I'd made an effort at work, but the effort I made now was to live.
It wasn't that I wanted to die; it was just that I was tired of trying.”

“That was the face of my dead son.
Köichi was dead.
And he would be tomorrow, too. From now on he would always be dead.”

“I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there's the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”