“But for someone like me, who moved into an entirely different world when still quite young, it’s as if a deep gap divides my past and my present.”
― quote from A True Novel
“Time flew over me, its black wings spread.”
― quote from A True Novel
“I believe that a girl begins life as a doll her mother can dress up as she pleases, a mirror where her mother's fancies are reflected; but as she grows older, her own nature begins to show.”
― quote from A True Novel
“She's still quite fit at ninety, fit enough to chew her food with her own teeth. Apparently she grew up in a house without a bar of soap, let alone tooth powder. Her family didn't have electricity until she started elementary school, and she'd never seen a train until the tracks of the Koumi line were laid in Saku. It's exactly as if she were born in the Edo period. These days, you only have to drive for five minutes to find a sparkling clean convenience store, with bright lights above shelves stocked with everything you could possibly need. Land that used to be fields of mulberry bushes is now crisscrossed by smooth, wide roads lined with video rental stores and fast food restaurants.
I would say O-Hatsu has seen more changes in her lifetime than I have. After all, she lived for most of the century when this country was changing faster than it ever had before. Even so, I have a feeling that the inside of her head has remained much the same as when she was a girl. By "the inside of her head" I mean the way she sees the world around her—the language she uses to make sense of it. In my case, the very way I looked at the world and the words I used to understand it had altogether changed.”
― quote from A True Novel
“IN MICHIGAN IT seemed as if spring would never come; then when it did, all too soon it was summer. One day I realized the cold was loosening its grip, and then overnight, the weather turned hot, with the sun whitening the concrete streets. As if to reward themselves for having endured such a long, harsh winter, everyone walked around wearing as little as they could get away with.”
― quote from A True Novel
“Privately, I felt that living in that privileged environment, where her emotions ran unchecked, had made her oversensitive and unstable.”
― quote from A True Novel
“I believe that intelligence and rationality will always be primary no matter what shape sentient creatures take. To not think that would be to doubt the value of life itself.”
― Peter F. Hamilton, quote from Pandora's Star
“Then take it all! Take my life! What care I now that the wench is gone! Damn her! Damn her fickle heart! Ah, man, I hate her! Fickle wife! She taunts me, seduces me, cajoles me, flees me, leaves me wanting her all the more. Have I no more will of my own?"
His voice broke, and he sobbed, hiding his face behind an arm flung across it. Shanna's throat tightened, and there was no ease for the ache in her breat. With tears of her own gathering in her eyes she tried to hush him. He heard none of her pleas, but lifted his hands and held them before his eyes, turning them, staring at them as if he had never seen them before.
"But still - I love her. I could take my freedom and fly - but she holds me bound to her." His hands became limp fists which slowly crumpled to his sides as he groaned listlessly. "I cannot stay. I cannot leave." His eyes closed, and swiftly the moment was gone.
Choking on a sob, Shanna bowed her head in abject misery.”
― Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, quote from Shanna
“Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Enticed
“The most she knew about gardens was the Bakers’ own backyard, which contained one large mulberry tree and a rosebush, plus the window boxes where her mother grew runner beans. She knew there was earth under the plants and that the earth contained worms. She shuddered.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, quote from House of Many Ways
“Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore. You're left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable. And then to put these things out as saleable items, you call them finished products - at times it's downright embarrassing just to think of it. Honestly, it can make me blush.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from The Elephant Vanishes
Notes from Undergrou...
The Sun Is Also a St...
Daimon
Mason & Dixon
Library of Souls
HoundedBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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