“I wondered if the Demon that whispered "Why not be free?" was Freedom itself.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“Isn't it better to regret things you've done, than regret things you've never even tried?”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“When you're sincere about doing something, you're stalked by the fear that there's no turning back.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“The world is drowning in weirdness and lies......and here we are, so used to it that we're actually bored!”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“I'm not some pure heart chasing after dreams. I know how difficult it is to live an ordinary life, having to overlook each other's shortcomings.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“... back then the sky seemed so vast.
And now the sky above me... is low, and narrow, and heavy.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“We were like visitors to some strange planet.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“ the path your life is stuck on and be free
It's a dark whisper calling to me.
But I'm not brave enough to listen. I'm old enough to know I don't have any special talents. So no matter how depressing... I have to suck it up... And live the life I have.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“Besides... I'm very old and I can't remember things too well anymore. When my letters come back to me, it makes me feel like my wife still remembers me.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“Today is the first step of our new lives.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“Nothing's going to change if you're just thinking about it. No matter how much you worry about someone else's problems.... you can't fix it for them.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“Anyway, I think the two of you should be free to do whatever you want right now. When you're young, you think the only way to happiness is the hard road... but it's actually much simpler than that.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“My brand new sandals are a little stiff, and I think they'll give me blisters. But I love them, so I'll probably wear them out.
With cautious feet, we move forward. Today is the first step of our new lives.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
“I bet even this little boy will grow up to be an adult before he realizes. He'll just become an adult like that. Whether he accepts it or resists until the end is a big fork in the path of life, I suppose.”
― Inio Asano, quote from Solanin
Inio Asano
Born place: in Ibaraki, Japan
Born date September 22, 1980
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“Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How it could
come to pass I do not know, but I remember it clearly. The
dream embraced thousands of years and left in me only a
sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of their
sin and downfall. Like a vile trichina, like a germ of the
plague infecting whole kingdoms, so I contaminated all this
earth, so happy and sinless before my coming. They learnt
to lie, grew fond of lying, and discovered the charm of
falsehood. Oh, at first perhaps it began innocently, with a
jest, coquetry, with amorous play, perhaps indeed with a
germ, but that germ of falsity made its way into their hearts
and pleased them. Then sensuality was soon begotten,
sensuality begot jealousy, jealousy - cruelty . . . Oh, I don't
know, I don't remember; but soon, very soon the first blood
was shed. They marvelled and were horrified, and began to
be split up and divided. They formed into unions, but it was
against one another. Reproaches, upbraidings followed.
They came to know shame, and shame brought them to
virtue. The conception of honour sprang up, and every union
began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and
the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became
hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for
isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began
to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with
sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said
that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then
science appeared. As they became wicked they began talking
of brotherhood and humanitarianism, and understood those
ideas. As they became criminal, they invented justice and
drew up whole legal codes in order to observe it, and to
ensure their being kept, set up a guillotine. They hardly
remembered what they had lost, in fact refused to believe that
they had ever been happy and innocent. They even laughed
at the possibility o this happiness in the past, and called it a
dream. They could not even imagine it in definite form and
shape, but, strange and wonderful to relate, though they lost
all faith in their past happiness and called it a legend, they so
longed to be happy and innocent once more that they
succumbed to this desire like children, made an idol of it, set
up temples and worshipped their own idea, their own desire;
though at the same time they fully believed that it was
unattainable and could not be realised, yet they bowed down
to it and adored it with tears! Nevertheless, if it could have
happened that they had returned to the innocent and happy
condition which they had lost, and if someone had shown it
to them again and had asked them whether they wanted to go
back to it, they would certainly have refused. They answered
me:
"We may be deceitful, wicked and unjust, we know it and
weep over it, we grieve over it; we torment and punish
ourselves more perhaps than that merciful Judge Who will
judge us and whose Name we know not. But we have
science, and by the means of it we shall find the truth and we
shall arrive at it consciously. Knowledge is higher than
feeling, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science
will give us wisdom, wisdom will reveal the laws, and the
knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than
happiness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
“When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from Here on Earth
“The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she’d grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from In the Lake of the Woods
“The strangest thing about strange things is that they're only strange when you hear about them or think about them later, but never when you're living them.”
― Lori Lansens, quote from The Girls
“Ten years ago, we would have been writing perfect stories, but people's attention spans have become more limited in these, the last days of literacy.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, quote from City of Saints and Madmen
Mine
Vernon God Little
Plum Island
Map of Bones
Blood Destiny
My Family and Other...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.
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