“People trust their eyes above all else - but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see; not what is really there”
“Better naked and alive than decent and dead, I thought.”
“You see, that is why it is so easy to fool people with our illusions, Yue. In this world, illusions are usually much kinder than the truth.”
“I would listen to her soft voice and wonder if, somewhere deep inside, she was screaming, too.”
“Our greatest warriors,' Terayama-san said, 'believe that they are already dead. They live as if their lives are over, and so fighting holds no terror for them.'
A Suda-san looked gravely at him. 'That, Terayama-san, is one of the saddest things I have ever heard.”
“On my fourteenth birthday when the sakura was in full bloom, the men came to kill us.”
“I am so angry all the time, and so sad, and it screams inside me and never stops. Cutting is the only thing that eases me.”
“Real love is hard because it requires one to know and accept another person with all their faults.”
“How much easier life was once you learned how to lie. I had gotten into trouble by speaking out of turn, arguing and answering back so many times. Not anymore. Now I would do what I wanted, and no one would stop me.”
“Couldn't a woman be happy doing a great many things, just as a man could?”
“People trust their eyes above all else- but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see; not what is really there.”
“It is not like that. I am not punishing myself. The cutting makes me feel better.” “Hurting”
“And together we disappeared into the darkness swift and silent as shadows on the moon.”
“You humans are always locking each other away. Cells. Dungeons. Some of your earliest jails were sewers, where men sloshed in their own waste. No other creature has this arrogance—to confine its own. Could you imagine a bird imprisoning another bird? A horse jailing a horse? As a free form of expression, I will never understand it. I can only say that some of my saddest sounds have been heard in such places. A song inside a cage is never a song. It is a plea.”
“Normal is a setting on a washing machine.”
“We just want to be where we're supposed to be. We just want to be with the people we want to be with. I don't think that's asking for too much, ya know what I'm saying?”
“well-known."
"You're saying Raynen is behind this?"
"Lad, he cannot help but see you as a threat. And they say he's been distraught of late-unbalanced." He shook his head. "I cannot believe all the problems this Initiation has had. I'm beginning to think it will take a miracle to pull it off. In”
“Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, the blondwood table's surface trembling with sunlight and the man's hand steady and face both haunted by regret and ennobled by resolve, this part of me sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas, and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this climactic scene of writing and signing it and addressing the envelope and affixing postage and putting the envelope in my shirt pocket (totally conscious of the resonance of its resting there, next to my heart, in the scene), planning to drop it in a mailbox on the way out to Lily Cache Rd. and the bridge abutment into which I planned to drive my car at speeds sufficient to displace the whole front end and impale me on the steering wheel and instantly kill me. Self-loathing is not the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death, if I was going to do it I wanted it instant’ (175-176)”
BookQuoters 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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.