Quotes from A True Novel

854 pages

Rating: (656 votes)


“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


Popular quotes

“I’ll always take care of you Rule, in fact I like doing it because it makes me happy and it feels good but I’m not ever going to let you use me to work out your demons like you did with all those girls that came before me so you better learn the difference.”
― Jay Crownover, quote from Rule


“I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.”
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― Astrid Lindgren, quote from Ronia, the Robber's Daughter


“It was almost exactly like the caves to the east where my girl cousins met their swains to canoodle.”
― Jessica Day George, quote from Dragon Slippers


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