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“there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“That’s what it’s like to lose a woman. And at a certain time, losing one woman means losing all women. That’s how we become Men Without Women. We lose Percy faith, Francis Lai, and 101 Strings. And ammonites and coelacanths. And we lose her beautiful back. But all of that has vanished. All that remains is an old broken piece of eraser, and the far-off sound of the sailor’s dirge. And the unicorn beside the fountain, his lonely horn aimed at the sky.

I hope that M is in heaven now – or somewhere like it. And it would be nice if her thoughts occasionally turn to me. But maybe that’s asking too much. I pray that, even if I’m not part of it, M is happy and at peace, with music playing on into eternity.

As one of the Men Without Women, I pray for this with all my heart. At this point prayer seems like the only thing I can do. Probably.”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“There’s a joke that I once heard a comedienne tell. It goes like this: “I’m not sure if I’m ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, ‘Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up, they blame me for everything that’s wrong with their lives?’ She laughed and said, ‘What do you mean, if?’ ”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.

“Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“This is the story of a man named Neil Fisk, and how he came to love God.

...

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn't previously played a role in Neil's life, he wasn't afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

Now that Sarah was in Heaven, his situation had changed. Neil wanted more than anything to be reunited with her, and the only way to get to Heaven was to love God with all his heart.

...

And God sent him to Hell anyway.”
― Ted Chiang, Hell is the Absence of God

“In 1770, Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, "Kanguru." From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn’t until later that they learned it meant "What did you say?”
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others

“Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“What if the differences between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?"
I speculated such a suggestion could be seen as a serious deviancy.
Melphi seemed delited. "Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror."
I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.
Melphi relplied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

“When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope. At that time a great deal was said about the Vindications: books of apology and prophecy which vindicated for all time the acts of every man in the universe and retained prodigious arcana for his future. Thousands of the greedy abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed up the stairways, urged on by the vain intention of finding their Vindication. These pilgrims disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways, flung the deceptive books into the air shafts, met their death cast down in a similar fashion by the inhabitants of remote regions. Others went mad ... The Vindications exist (I have seen two which refer to persons of the future, to persons who are perhaps not imaginary) but the searchers did not remember that the possibility of a man's finding his Vindication, or some treacherous variation thereof, can be computed as zero.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“Xin cho thiên đàng tồn tại, dù cho hỏa ngục phần tôi.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“Tôi thấy trước rằng con người sẽ buông mình cho những việc từng ngày càng bạo tàn hơn; chẳng mấy chốc tất cả những người còn lại chỉ là lính tráng và trộm cướp; tôi tặng họ lời khuyên này: Kẻ thực hiện một việc bạo tàn phải tưởng tượng mình đã hoàn thành việc đó, phải áp đặt cho mình một tương lai cũng bất khả vãn hồi như quá khứ. Và như thế tôi đi tiếp, trong khi đôi mắt tôi, đôi mắt của một kẻ đã chết, ghi nhận ngày trôi qua mà rất có thể là ngày cuối, và đêm tỏa rộng dần.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“Tư duy là quên đi những điểm khác nhau, là khái quát hóa, trừu tượng hóa.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves - living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.”
― Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“To say goodbye is to die a little.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye