“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“For example, the wind has its reasons. We just don't notice as we go about our lives. But then, at some point, we are made to notice. The wind envelops you with a certain purpose in mind, and it rocks you. The wind knows everything that's inside you. And not just the wind. Everything, including a stone. They all know us very well. From top to bottom. It only occurs to us at certain times. And all we can do is go with those things. As we take them in, we survive, and deepen.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Still, in the end, we all die just the same.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“I tell lies sometimes. The last time I lied was a year ago. I absolutely detest lying. You could say that lying and silence are the two greatest sins of present day society. Actually, I lie a lot, and I'm always clamming up.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“The worst thoughts usually strike in the dead of the night.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Even if you don't acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That's just how it is.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“When the time comes, everybody’s got to end up where they belong. Only me, I didn’t have a place to call my own. It’s like musical chairs.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“If you're looking for fine art or literature, you might want to read some stuff written by the Greeks. Because to create true fine art, slaves are a necessity. That's how the ancient Greeks felt, with slaves working the fields, cooking their meals, rowing their ships, all the while their citizens, under the Mediterranean Sun, indulged in poetry writing and grappled with mathematics. That was their idea of fine art.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“The things we try our hardest not to lose, we really just put deep abysses in the spaces between them.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“The more honest I try to be, the more the right words recede into the distance.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Expression and communication are essential; without these, civilization ends.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“I like the sky. You can look at it forever and never get tired of it, and when you don’t want to look at it anymore, you stop.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Everybody's gotta die sometime. But until then we've still got fifty-some odd years to go, and a lot to think about while we're living those fifty years, and I'll just come right out and say it: that's even more tiring than living five thousand years thinking about nothing. Don't you think?”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Whenever I wake up in a strange house I always feel as if the wrong soul got stuffed into the wrong body.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“The scent of the sea and the burning asphalt being carried on the southerly wind made me think of summers past. The warmth of a girl's skin, old rock n' roll, button-down shirts right out of the wash, the smell of cigarettes smoked in the pool locker room, faint premonitions, everyone's sweet, limitless summer dreams. And then one year(when was it?), those dreams didn't come back.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Even from whatever miserable experience you might have, there is something to be learned.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“All of us are laboring under the same conditions. It's like we're all flying in the same busted airplane. Sure, some of us are luckier than others. Some are tough and some are weak. Some are rich and some are poor. But no one's superman - in that way, we're all weak. If we own things, we're terrified we'll lose them; if we've got nothing we worry it'll be that way forever. We're all the same. If you catch on to that early enough, you can try to make yourself stronger, even if only a little. It's okay to fake it. Right? There are no truly strong people. Only people who pretend to be strong.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Telling lies is a really terrible thing. These days, lies and silence are the two greatest sins in human society you might say. In reality, we tell lots of lies, and we often break into silence. However, if we were constant;y talking year-round, and telling only the truth truth would probably lose some of its value.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“Coba kau pikirkan baik-baik. Kondisi semua orang sama saja. Sama seperti ketika kita naik pesawat rusak. Tentu saja di situ ada orang yang bernasib baik dan bernasib buruk. Ada yang tangguh, ada juga yang lemah; ada yang kaya, ada pula yang miskin. Hanya saja, tidak ada orang yang memiliki kekuatan yang jauh lebih besar daripada orang lain. Semua orang sama. Orang yang memiliki sesuatu selalu khawatir, jangan-jangan apa yang dia miliki sekarang akan hilang, sedangkan orang yang tidak memiliki apa-apa selalu cemas, jangan-jangan selamanya aku akan tetap menjadi orang yang tidak punya apa-apa. Semua orang sama! Karena itu, manusia yang menyadari hal itu lebih cepat harus berusaha menjadi sedikit lebih tangguh. Sekadar pura-pura pun tidak apa. Betul kan? Di mana pun tidak akan ada manusia yang tangguh. Yang ada hanyalah manusia yang pura-pura tangguh.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“When people are dead, you can forgive them 'most anything.”
― Haruki Murakami, quote from Hear the Wind Sing
“I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then," he added in a lower tone, "I ate my own wickedness.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Uljas uusi maailma
“MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2011 Port St. Lucie, Florida First impressions are important, and in his first full meeting with us as the Mets manager, Terry Collins makes a really good one. We are in a conference room in Digital Domain Park. Everybody is there—Sandy Alderson, the new general manager, his assistants, the players, the coaches, the trainers, the clubhouse manager, and even our two cooks. We go around the room and introduce ourselves. Sandy speaks first. “The expectations for this club outside of this room are very low,” he says. “I know you guys expect more of yourself, and I expect more of you too.”Sandy is not a rah-rah guy, and his approach is low-key but very compelling. “The goal of any professional sports franchise is to win, and that’s why we’re here.” When he’s done, he turns the floor over to Terry, who says, “Sandy stole my speech.” Everybody laughs. Terry has no notes. He speaks from the heart. I’ve heard a lot of these first-day speeches, and believe me, it’s more common than not for them to seem formulaic, straight off boilerplate. This is not like that at all. Terry is intense, fiery, and enthusiastic. I never get the feeling he is saying things for effect. It seems so authentic, the way he makes contact with everybody in the room and jacks up the decibel level. Even when he dabbles in clichés—“We’re going to do things the right way”—you can’t help but feel his passion and energy. Terry is a small man and doesn’t have an imposing presence when you first see him, but he is powerful nonetheless. The essence of his talk is simple: “Everybody says we’re going to stink. I hear it over and over. I think they’ve got it all wrong. You want to come along as we prove them all wrong?” Terry talks for twenty minutes or so, and by the time he is done, all I can think of is: This is a guy I’m really going to enjoy playing for. CHAPTER THREE FAITH ON WALNUT Some kids are fighters. Other kids are scrappers. I am a scrapper. I spend two extremely scrappy years—fifth and sixth grades—at St. Edward School, and the trend continues into the seventh grade at Wright Middle School, where the kids are bigger and stronger than me, but not too many have less regard for their bodies. I don’t worry about pain or getting hit or getting knocked down. I just get back up and come back at you like a boomerang. My goal when I fight is simple: I want to give more than I receive. This doesn’t make me proud. It’s just what it takes to survive, and in seventh grade survival is what I’m all about. Fights aren’t an everyday occurrence in my neighborhood, but I seem to have more than my share of them. I fight to defend myself, to right a wrong, or to settle a dispute. I’m not picky. I figure out early that in a school where smoke billows out of the bathroom and pregnant girls walk the hallways, you don’t want people thinking you are wimpy. So I learn to act tough when I need to, and sometimes when I don’t need to—which gets me into trouble. In the lunchroom one day, I get up from my seat. You have assigned seats at Wright at lunchtime, and strict rules about leaving them, the school’s effort to prevent the cafeteria from turning into WrestleMania. But I need to get a homework assignment from a classmate, so I get up and walk across the lunchroom. A monitor corrals me and says, Get back to your seat. He’s kind of nasty about it. I don’t appreciate his tone. I cuss under my breath. Not loud, not a bad cussword, but an audible obscenity, no doubt. Now he doesn’t appreciate my tone. Come with me, young man. You are going to regret your garbage mouth. He’s right—I am going to regret it—because this is Tennessee in the mid-1980s and corporal punishment still rules the day. The monitor escorts me down to see Mr. Tinnon, the assistant principal in charge of paddling. He conveniently keeps the paddle by his desk.”
― quote from Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball
“I have always been suspicious of the phrase, the glow of pregnancy, and my suspicions were only confirmed by Lillian's appearance. Instead of a glow, her whole body seemed to become more and more dull, sallow and sickly sweet and vague, like a candle burning out or a line of smudged writing.”
― John Burnside, quote from The Dumb House
“His colleagues at the Bar called him Filth, but not out of irony. It was because he was considered to be the source of the old joke, Failed In London Try Hong Kong. It was said that he had fled the London Bar, very young, very poor, on a sudden whim just after the War, and had done magnificently well in Hong Kong from the start. Being a modest man, they said, he had called himself a parvenu, a fraud, a carefree spirit.
Filth in fact was no great maker of jokes, was not at all modest about his work and seldom, except in great extremity, went in for whims. He was loved, however, admired, laughed at kindly and still much discussed many years after retirement.”
― Jane Gardam, quote from Old Filth
“Icicle gave him an amused, arch look. How adorable, a RainWing with a crush on my brother. Winter”
― Tui T. Sutherland, quote from Moon Rising
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