Matsuo Bashō · 224 pages
Rating: (454 votes)
“Sadly, I part from you;
Like a clam torn from its shell,
I go, and autumn too.”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“Lonely stillness— a single cicada’s cry sinking into stone”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“A warbler singing— somewhere beyond the willow, before the thicket”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“The past remains hidden in clouds of memory.”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
“Spring passes
and the birds cry out—tears
in the eyes of fishes”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Narrow Road to the Interior: And Other Writings
Matsuo Bashō
Born place: in Matsuo Kinsaku, Japan
Born date January 1, 1644
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“I’m sorry, Olivia, for hurting you,” he said hoarsely and my heart heaved in my
chest. Why was his voice so gentle? Why wasn’t he screaming at me? I was the one
who did the hurting. It was me. My fault. My sin. My mess. “You will never see me again after today.” He paused and his next words struck me so deeply I would never recover from them. “I will love again, Olivia, you will hurt forever. What you’ve done is…You are worthless because you make yourself that way. You will remember me every day for the rest of your life because I was the one and you threw me away.” And then he left.”
― Tarryn Fisher, quote from The Opportunist
“He had no document but his memory; the training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who set down and forget temporary, incomplete paragraphs. He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated certain symbols as over-obvious, such as the repeated striking of the clock, the music. Nothing hurried him. He omitted, he condensed, he amplified. In certain instances he came back to the original version. He came to feel affection for the courtyard, the barracks; one of the faces before him modified his conception of Roemerstadt's character. He discovered that the wearying cacophonies that bothered Flaubert so much are mere visual superstitions, weakness and limitation of the written word, not the spoken...He concluded his drama. He had only the problem of a single phrase. He found it. The drop of water slid down his cheek. He opened his mouth in a maddened cry, moved his face, dropped under the quadruple blast.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
“Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?”
― David Benioff, quote from City of Thieves
“Some wounds need to be pricked so they can drain. Others just need to be left alone.”
― Patricia Briggs, quote from Blood Bound
“Denying the undeniable just makes you sound like a fool as well as a liar.”
― Ally Carter, quote from Only the Good Spy Young
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