Nova > Nova's Quotes

“As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again and again. Again and again I will suffer; again and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won't let my spirit be destroyed.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“It's really hard to put into words things that are just a little bit not okay.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“Why does the night have to be so beautiful? As I walk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“even a cracked pot has a lid that fits.”
― Hiromi Kawakami, The Briefcase

“That child who sprang from my own flesh and blood is perhaps the creature I'm most distant from.”
― Kim Hye-Jin, Concerning My Daughter

“There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“You were caught off guard. You never thought of Mom as separate from the kitchen. Mom was the kitchen and the kitchen was Mom. You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“How long do we have to just survive? When will we be able to live rather than just focus on surviving?”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

“… If I could make a wish I want to be just a little happier
If I become too happy I will miss sadness”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“A house is such a strange thing. Everything else gets more worn when people handle it, and sometimes you can feel a person’s poison if you get too close to him, but that’s not what happens to a house. Even a good house falls apart quickly when nobody stops by. A house is alive only when there are people living in it, brushing against it, staying in it.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“When I start to feel emotional about something, I can't tell if I'm actually feeling that way. What if it's just something somebody wrote in a book? Or maybe a line or a performance from some movie... Either way, I get this feeling like I'm quoting somebody else's work.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“There is no such person who can’t be saved. There are only people who give up on trying to save others. It’s”
― Won-pyung Sohn, Almond

“Sometimes you almost forgot: that you didn't look like everyone else. In homeroom or at the drugstore or at the supermarket, you listened to morning announcements or dropped off a roll of film or picked up a carton of eggs and felt like just another someone in the crowd. Sometimes you didn't think about it at all. And then sometimes you noticed the girl across the aisle watching, the pharmacist watching, the checkout boy watching, and you saw yourself reflected in their stares: incongruous. Catching the eye like a hook. Every time you saw yourself from the outside, the way other people saw you, you remembered all over again.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“It's not my fault. It's not your fault. It's no one's fault. If we keep telling ourselves that, then who should all the victims of the world go to for their apology?”
― Kim Hye-Jin, Concerning My Daughter

“If you make plenty of money but don't have any kids, you might get called successful. But unless you have kids, no one will ever call you a great woman.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“What I'm really scared of is believing the words society makes me speak are my own.”
― Sayaka Murata, Earthlings

“If the love is true, then treat it the same way you would plant - feed it, protect it from the elements - you must do absolutely everything you can. But if it isn't true, then it's best to just let it wither on the vine.”
― Hiromi Kawakami, The Briefcase

“I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.”
― Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

“I, on the other hand, still might not be considered a proper adult. I had been very grown-up in primary school. But as I continued through secondary school, I in fact became less grown-up. And then as the years passed, I turned into quite a childlike person. I suppose I just wasn't able to ally myself with time.”
― hiromi kawakami, The Briefcase

“That was the first time he sobbed in earnest. Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.”
― Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny

“I simply spoke in a way that I would be liked within whichever community I happened to be in. I responded to wherever I was in order to adapt to it. I was just like a robot.”
― Sayaka Murata, Life Ceremony