Quotes

I love quotes.Some authors just have a way of making every word blend together in such a sublime way. I think one of the reasons I really love quotes though, is they manage to connect to me in a way nothing else can. I think a lot, but am terrible at putting my thoughts together into ideas to explain what it is I'm thinking. Books though, they always seem to be able to put them into words. So, here are my favourite quotes, of which I mostly relate to, from some of my favourite authors. Also, if you have any you love and want to share please add them to the comments. :) 

Haruki Murakami 

If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.

Here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can,just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

Memories are what warm you up from the inside. But they're also what tear you apart.

Don't feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back.  That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories.  A room like the stacks in this library.  And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards.  We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases.  In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.

Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars.

I have this strange feeling that I'm  not myself anymore. It's hard to put into words, but I guess it's like I was fast asleep, and someone came, disassembled me, and hurriedly put me back together again. That sort of feeling.
                             
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to sleep through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you get there.

Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That's part of what it means to be alive.

No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.

According to Aristophanes in Plato's The Banquet, in the ancient world of legend there were three types of people. In ancient times people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types : male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing half.

                                     

Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.

To know one's own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one's own face with one's own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one's reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

I'm not so weird to me.

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.

What happens when people open their hearts?"..."They get better.

When I wake up, my pillow's cold and damp with tears. But tears for what? I have no idea.

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.

But if something did happen, it happened. Whether it's right or wrong. I accept everything that happens, and that's how I became the person I am now.

                          

As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.

My shadow is only half of what it should be.

She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.

Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars.

There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm after. I don't know what my strengths are or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.

I've never met a girl who thinks like you...."A lot of people tell me that," she said, digging at a cuticle. "But it's the only way I know how to think. Seriously. I'm just telling you what I believe. It's never crossed my mind that my way of thinking is different from other people's. I'm not trying to be different. But when I speak out honestly, everybody thinks I'm kidding or playacting. When that happens, I feel like everything is such a pain!"

I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.

I've built a wall around me, never letting anybody inside and trying not to venture outside myself.

Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly and if possible sincerely.

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them

To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....

All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.

What makes the desert beautiful, said the little prince, is that somewhere it hides a well...

People have forgotten this truth, the fox said. But you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose.

I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.

Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.
                    
I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.

I am beginning to understand, said the little prince. There is a flower... I think that she has tamed me...

It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.

One runs the risk of crying a bit if one allows oneself to be tamed.

They never say to you, 'What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect  butterflies?' Instead, they demand 'How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much money does his father make?' Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

That is the hardest thing of all. It is much harder to judge yourself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself, it's because you're truly a wise man.

But if you come at just any time, I shall never know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you.

To forget a friend is sad. Not every one has had a friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown-ups who are no longer interested in anything but figures..

Jonathan Safran Foer

          

Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.

I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else.

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

When I looked at you, my life made sense. Even the bad things made sense. They were necessary to make you possible.

There were things I wanted to tell him.  But I knew they would hurt him.  So I buried them, and let them hurt me.

Why do beautiful songs make you sad?' 'Because they aren't true.' 'Never?' 'Nothing is beautiful and true.

I'm so afraid of losing something I love that I refuse to love anything

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.

I feel too much.  That's what's going on.'  'Do you think one can feel too much?  Or just feel in the wrong ways?'  'My insides don't match up with my outsides.'  'Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?'  'I don't know.  I'm only me.'  'Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside.'  'But it's worse for me.'  'I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him.'  'Probably.  But it really is worse for me.

Songs are as sad as the listener.
                                         
Being with him made my brain quiet. I didn't have to invent a thing.

We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it

In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that, and so I felt, that night, like the turtle that everything else in the universe was on top of.

Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?

The end of suffering does not justify the suffering, and so there is no end to suffering.

But I still couldn't figure out what it all meant.  The more I found out, the less I understood.

I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me.

I didn't understand why I needed help, because it seemed to me that you should wear heavy boots when your dad dies, and if you aren't wearing heavy boots, then you need help.

I hope you never think about anything as much as I think about you.

It  was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn't think about my life at all.

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

It broke my heart into more pieces than my heart was made of, why can't people say what they mean at the time?

Parents are always more knowledgeable than their children, and children are always smarter than their parents.

Mark Haddon 

             

I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lies....and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt. 

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult. 

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. 

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.