Xia > Xia's Quotes

“...for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in a millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”
― William Faulkner

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“You lose your immortality when you lose your memory.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

“What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought he, and fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky- the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran," thought Prince Andrew- "not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!...”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

“Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.”
― William Faulkner

“Love loves to love love.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
― W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays

“Just so you know, Araragi-kun, I hate romantic comedies where it is obvious the two will get together at the end but lukewarm developments keep them at an in-between more-than-friends-less-than-lovers state chapter after chapter just to keep the story going.”

“...I see.”

“Incidentally, I also hate sports manga where each match takes an entire year and yet you know they are going to win in the end. I also hate battle manga where it is clear they will defeat the final boss and bring peace to the world, but the battles with weaker enemies go on forever.”

“I think you just covered every shounen manga and shoujo manga in existence.”

- Senjougahara Hitagi & Araragi Koyomi”
― NisiOisiN, 化物語 (上) [Bakemonogatari]

“To accept the world as boring or accept oneself as boring? Which is really more agreeable? There's bound to be some amount of ambiguity and uncertainty.”
― NisiOisiN, Zaregoto, Book 1: The Kubikiri Cycle

“Um, where are we headed now?"

"Heaven. Or maybe Hell. I forget."

"They're totally different."

"Yup, totally different. They're complete opposites. So we're bound to end up at one of them.”
― NisiOisiN, Zaregoto, Book 1: The Kubikiri Cycle

“I heard that you could help me.”

“Me? That’s impossible,” said Oshino in a joking tone of voice. “Only you can help yourself, ojou-chan.”
― NisiOisiN, 化物語 (上) [Bakemonogatari]

“I'm a kid. I'm not brave. I'm always confused. But I felt pretty glad that... I didn't kill myself.”
― Yuhki Kamatani, しまなみ誰そ彼 1

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Comics are drawings, not photographs, and as such they present a subjective view of reality.”
― Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga

“All Moanday, Tearday, Wailsday, Thumpsday, Frightday, Shatterday.”
― James Joyce

“First we feel. Then we fall.”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!”
― James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

“On turning to the Work in Progress we find that the mirror is not so convex. Here is direct expression--pages and pages of it. And if you don’t understand it, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is because you are too decadent to receive it. You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other. This rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation. The form that is an arbitrary and independent phenomenon can fulfil no higher function than that of stimulus for a tertiary or quartary conditioned reflex of dribbling comprehension. . . Mr. Joyce has a word to say to you on the subject: “Yet to concentrate solely on the literal sense or even the psychological content of any document to the sore neglect of the enveloping facts themselves circumstantiating it is just as harmful; etc.” And another: “Who in his hearts doubts either that the facts of feminine clothiering are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere? Or that one may be separated from the orther? Or that both may be contemplated simultaneously? Or that each may be taken up in turn and considered apart from the other?”

Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read--or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.”
― Samuel Beckett

“Being alone is best. I mean, it's true, isn't it? In the end you'll be absolutely alone; therefore, being alone is natural. If you accept that, nothing bad can happen. That's why I shut myself away in my six-mat one-room apartment.”
― Tatsuhiko Takimoto, Welcome to the N.H.K.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird