“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
“You get a strange feeling when you're about to leave a place, I told him, like you'll not only miss the people you love but you'll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you'll never be this way ever again.”
― Azar Nafisi, quote from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“Nine, now eight. Are the rest of you out there?”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Power of Six
“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives
“There are some men who, living with the one object of enriching themselves, no matter by what means, and being perfectly conscious of the baseness and rascality of the means which they will use every day towards this end, affect nevertheless—even to themselves—a high tone of moral rectitude, and shake their heads and sigh over the depravity of the world. Some of the craftiest scoundrels that ever walked this earth, or rather—for walking implies, at least, an erect position and the bearing of a man—that ever crawled and crept through life by its dirtiest and narrowest ways, will gravely jot down in diaries the events of every day, and keep a regular debtor and creditor account with Heaven, which shall always show a floating balance in their own favour. Whether this is a gratuitous (the only gratuitous) part of the falsehood and trickery of such men's lives, or whether they really hope to cheat Heaven itself, and lay up treasure in the next world by the same process which has enabled them to lay up treasure in this—not to question how it is, so it is. And, doubtless, such book-keeping (like certain autobiographies which have enlightened the world) cannot fail to prove serviceable, in the one respect of sparing the recording Angel some time and labour.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from Nicholas Nickleby
“And if my present actions strike you as foolish, let's just say I've been accused of folly by a fool.”
― Sophocles, quote from The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone
Independence
Song of the Sparrow
Never Seduce a Scot
Storm and Silence
The Schopenhauer Cur...
Going SoloBookQuoters 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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