Justin > Justin's Quotes

“Ah yes, all unfinished stories make you sad.” “That’s why we are driven to finish our work. To escape that sadness.” “To escape the melancholy of untold history.”
― Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of Untold History

“I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― Fitzgerald F. Scott, The Great Gatsby

“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

“Can’t repeat the past?…Why of course you can!”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“Men who start by burning books end by burning other men,”
― Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

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

“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“You are in every line I have ever read.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“But loyalty is a quality that is more complex than people realize. It is not an absolute virtue that all good people must follow, for even a virtuous person may commit evil by being loyal to a wicked person. For the wise, it must be balanced by the sound judgment of whether the person you are giving it to is worthy of it.”
― Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of Untold History

“Am I . . .” the storyteller began, “am I imagining you . . . or are you imagining me?” “I don’t know,” the historian replied. “Perhaps we are two versions of a third, the one who is imagining both of us, as Darkbloom might have put it.”
― Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of Untold History

“All unfinished stories make me sad.”
― Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of Untold History

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel