Tetsuko Kuroyanagi · 232 pages
Rating: (18.2K votes)
“Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved and therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster.”
― Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, quote from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window
“Drying her eyes, Mother said to Totto-chan very slowly, "You're Japanese and Masao-chan comes from a country called Korea. But he's a child, just like you. So, Totto-chan, dear, don't ever think of people as different. Don't think, 'That person's a Japanese, or this person's a Korean.' Be nice to Masao-chan. It's so sad that some people think other people aren't nice just because they're Koreans.”
― Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, quote from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window
“Down through the ages and in the whole world, Watt and Newton cannot have been the only ones to notice the steam from a boiling kettle or observe an apple fall. Having eyes, but not seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds, but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved and therefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said the headmaster.”
― Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, quote from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window
“He wanted to teach the children that all bodies are beautiful.”
― Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, quote from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window
“But there’s no doubt that children have an innate sense of humor. No matter how young they are, they always know when something’s really funny.”
― Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, quote from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window
“children could be taught to hear and feel music in their minds rather than just with their ears; how to make them feel music as a thing of movement rather than a dull, lifeless subject; how to awaken a child’s sensitivity.”
― Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, quote from Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window
“January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [...]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.”
― quote from The Price of Salt
“She would never, ever understand the idea that a child, especially an infant, was of more value than an adult who had already gained all the skills needed to benefit the community. The death of a new hatchling was so common as to be expected. The death of a child about to feather, yes, that was sad. But a real tragedy was the loss of an adult with friends and lovers and family. The idea that a loss of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around.”
― Becky Chambers, quote from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
“I thought about how in movies, usually action movies, a cheap way of getting the audience to invest in the plot is to endanger the life of a dog. There can be fifty men graphically terminated by machine-gun fire or an entire building full of workers destroyed, but no one will stand for a cute little dog being killed. And almost always, the dog's life is spared to the relief of the audience.”
― quote from Torture the Artist. Joey Goebel
“Each cell sends electrical pulses to other cells, up to hundreds of times per second. If you represented each of these trillions and trillions of pulses in your brain by a single photon of light, the combined output would be blinding.”
― David Eagleman, quote from Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
“I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
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