Matthew Rojas > Matthew's Quotes

“There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Everyone may be ordinary, but they're not normal.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Everything, everything seemed once-upon-a-time.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile.

I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose.

"It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow."

"Where do the lead?"

"To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere."

I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall.

"Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.”
― Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet

“Anytime things were going right for you, the future of the world seemed bright. Anytime they were going wrong, the imminent collapse of civilization was at hand. Can't you see how thoroughly you projected your own subjective vision of reality on the world?”
― Ryan Boudinot, Blueprints of the Afterlife

“If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“I'm not so weird to me.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“For both of us, it had simply been too enormous an experience. We shared it by not talking about it. Does this make any sense?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It's important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper. The fire isn't thinking 'Oh, this is Kant,' or 'Oh, this is the Yomiuri evening edition,' or 'Nice tits,' while it burns. To the fire, they're nothing but scraps of paper. It's the exact same thing. Important memories, not-so-important memories, totally useless memories: there's no distinction--they're all just fuel.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“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.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“Now I'm a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“How do you expect to communicate with the ocean, when you can’t even understand one another?”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris