maher > maher's Quotes

“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“You were my home, Mother. I had no home but you”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have to take jobs like this. She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar. I felt my guilt like a brand.... I had seen girls clamor for new clothes and complain about what their mothers made for dinner. I was always mortified. Didn't they know they were tying their mothers to the ground? Weren't chains ashamed of their prisoners?”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“her voice was amazing, like a 6B pencil”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive? I made myself crazy, tossing and turning, hyperventilat- ing. Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morn- ing never comes, you sleep forever. That must be what death is like. When someone dies, they don’t even know they’re dead. Because they never see it happen, nobody ever really dies. This hit me like a sucker punch.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“You see, I have long understood what most women learn by fire after they are married—that the hate mothers-in-law harbor toward their daughters-in-law is built into the genes of all women in this country. The bile festers below the surface, dormant but still lurking, until the son becomes of marriageable age; the resentment at being pushed aside, the anger of becoming second in their sons’ affections.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“Rich people are fascinated by happiness,” she said. “It’s something they find maddening.”
― Frances Cha, If I Had Your Face

“Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves the single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, slaughtered - is this the essential of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“I have searched for my mother's love in all the corners of the world.”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“Friendship is less simple. It is long and hard to obtain but when one has it there's no getting rid of it; one simply has to cope with it. Don't think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn't happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don't need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don't worry, they'll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful. As for suicide, they would be more likely to push you to it, by virtue of what you owe to yourself, according to them. May heaven protect us, cher Monsieur, from being set upon a pedestal by our friends!”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“Where are the eyes of my childhood, those fearful eyes she had thirty years ago, the eyes that made me?”
― Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness

“Being able to see the end of anything gave him a tremendous sense of relief. As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die.”
― Yōko Tawada, The Emissary

“You are not alone, Ash. I am with you. My soul is always with you.”
― Akimi Yoshida, Banana Fish, Vol. 19

“Just leave me alone. I'm happy goddammit. I know there's at least one person in this world... who cares about me. Who doesn't want anything from me. Do you have any idea what that's like? I never did. Not once in my entire life - until now. And that's worth more to me than anything else.”
― Akimi Yoshida, Banana Fish, Vol. 12

“For Beatrice, summer without you is as cold as winter. Winter without you, is even colder.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Hostile Hospital

“But I wasn’t crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“It's funny, but when I'm doing nothing, I get this feeling like I'm fighting something. Stick... fighting. It never goes away, even when I'm in bed, even when I'm walking around.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“No, I shouted. I don’t want that kind of strength. I don’t want to be dragged into this, and I don’t want to drag anyone else down, either.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Everything was beautiful. Not that there was anyone to share it with, anyone to tell. Just the beauty.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven't forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn't have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn't do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom's dreams?”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Either a mother and daughter know each other very well or they are strangers.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“You never wondered, Did Mom like being in the kitchen?”
― Kyung-sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“While offenders were in fear of losing a small part of their privilege, the victims were running the risk of losing everything.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“She couldn’t picture herself at the company ten years down the road and resigned after some thought. Her boss grumbled, “This is why we don’t hire women.” She replied, “Women don’t stay because you make it impossible for us to stay.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“Her career potential and areas of interest were being limited just because she had a baby.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“To you, Mom was always Mom. It never occurred to you that she had once taken her first step, or had once been three or twelve or twenty years old. Mom was Mom. She was born as Mom. Until you saw her running to your uncle like that, it hadn’t dawned on you that she was a human being who harbored the exact same feeling you had for your own brothers, and this realization led to the awareness that she, too, had had a childhood. From then on, you sometimes thought of Mom as a child, as a girl, as a young woman, as a newlywed, as a mother who had just given birth to you.”
― Kyung-Sook Shin, Please Look After Mom

“Had I ever chosen anything? Had I made some kind of choice that led me here? Thinking it over, I stared at the cell phone in my hands. The job that I was doing, the place where I was living, the fact that I was all alone and had no one to talk to. Could these have been the result of some decision that I'd made?
I heard a crow crying somewhere in the distance and turned to the window. It occurred to me that maybe I was where I was today because I hadn't chosen anything.
I applied to whatever colleges my teacher suggested and fell into a job after graduation, which I'd left only because I had to escape. I was only able to go freelance because of all the leg-work that Hijiri did for me. Had I ever chosen anything on my own, made something happen? Not once. And that's why I was here now, all alone.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night