“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everyone who has something is afraid of losing it, and people with nothing are worried they'll forever have nothing. Everyone is the same.”
“People with dark souls have nothing but dark dreams. People with really dark souls do nothing but dream.”
“Still, in the end, we all die just the same.”
“Things pass us by. Nobody can catch them. That's the way we live our lives.”
“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.”
“If writers only wrote about things everybody knew, what the hell would be the point of writing?”
“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.”
“Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.”
“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.”
“The worst thoughts usually strike in the dead of the night.”
“Even if you don't acknowledge it, people die, and guys sleep with girls. That's just how it is.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The things we try our hardest not to lose, we really just put deep abysses in the spaces between them.”
“The more honest I try to be, the more the right words recede into the distance.”
“Expression and communication are essential; without these, civilization ends.”
“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.”
“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?”
“Whenever I wake up in a strange house I always feel as if the wrong soul got stuffed into the wrong body.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Even from whatever miserable experience you might have, there is something to be learned.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“When people are dead, you can forgive them 'most anything.”
“I know you mean well, but you have to remember that things don't always work out like they do in your storybooks.”
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more, nor less.”
“But why do you want to talk to me?'
He is going to say: 'Because you look so kind,' or 'Because you look so beautiful and kind,' or, subtly, 'Because you look as if you'll understand....'
He says: 'Because I think you won't betray me.'
I had meant to get this mean to talk to me and tell me all about it, and then be so devastatingly English that perhaps I should manage to hurt him a little in return for all the many times I've been hurt.... 'Because I think you won't betray me, because I think you won't betray me....' Now it won't be so easy.”
“What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?”
“Visitors tried to cheer him up with the usual comforting banalities but he was not placated, until he was visited by the nun who had prepared him for his first Communion, Sister Dolores. ‘She said something that truly stuck with me,’ he later recalled, ‘and make me feel at peace: “you are imitating Christ” ’, he was told.”
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