cyberphobia541 > cyberphobia541's Quotes

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“I yearned for everything long gone.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“I go about saying how pained and tormented, how lonely and sad I feel, but what do I really mean by that? If I were to speak the truth, I would die.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can't bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“They scolded us for not having any real hopes or real ambitions, but if we were to pursue our true ideals, would these people watch and guide us along the way?”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“A mere smile can determine a woman's fate. It is frightening. Fascinatingly so. I have to be careful.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“I want to love everyone', I thought, almost tearfully. If you stare at the sky, it changes little by little. Gradually it turns bluish. [..] I had never seen anything as beautiful as the translucent leaves and grass. Gently, I reached out to the touch of the grass.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“The sly ability to steal someone else's experience and recreate it as if it were my own is the only real talent I possess. Really, though, my guile is so bogus as to be offensive. If I were to experience failure upon failure day after day—nothing but total embarrassment—then perhaps I'd develop some semblance of dignity as a result. But no, I would somehow illogically twist even such failures, gloss over them smoothly, so that it would seem like they had a perfectly good theory behind them. And I would have no qualms about putting on a desperate show to do so.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“There were four roses blooming in a corner of the yard. One was yellow, two were white, and one was pink. I sat there agape, looking at the flowers, and thought to myself, there are really good things about human beings. I mean, it's humans who discovered the beauty of flowers, and humans who admire them.”
― Osamu Dazai, Schoolgirl

“It is one thing to suspect yourself of going mad; it is another thing entirely to discover your suspicions are correct.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“I have followed Hamlet for so long, so blindly. Now that he is gone, I do not remember how to walk on my own.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“There’s not supposed to be anything left after the end of the world, even if the end of the world doesn’t quite happen.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The hero wasn’t me, any more than the villain was Harry McLauglin, forty-year-old forest ranger and father of two. We were just the matrices that held the pattern, the straw and clay from which myth was built. And now that we are only straw and clay again, the world does not know what to do with us.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The bad days were when the world wouldn’t stay out of his head, when everyone he looked at wore a swirling crown of color, and everything he touched carried the charge of someone else’s life.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The man wore black velvet, and on every branch of his wide-spreading antlers a tiny white candle burned serenely, anchored in its own wax. The man’s dark, lambent eyes met Sean’s, and Sean knew, then and ever after, that the stag-headed man understood him and loved him as no one in his life would.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“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

“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

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

“I have been told I've got a darkish personality. A few times."
Takahashi swings his trombone case from his right shoulder to his left. Then he says, "It's not as if our lives are divided simply into light and dark. There's shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does. And to acquire a healthy intelligence takes a certain amount of time and effort. I don't think you have a particularly dark character.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Is action merely the incidental product of thought, or is thought the consequential product of action?”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“But even though I was with my father again, I never felt really secure deep down. I don't know how to put it exactly, but things were never really settled inside me. I always had this feeling like, I don't know, like somebody was putting something over on me, like my real father had disappeared forever and, to fill the gap, some other guy was sent to me in his shape.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“Now I see -- we are always most revolted by the things hidden within us.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“And you wonder, what's wrong with me? Will anyone beautiful want me?”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“Happiness is so rare that our mind can turn somersaults to protect it.”
― David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly

“That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation