Yusuke > Yusuke's Quotes

“After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. ”
― Simone de Beauvoir

“The summer is cruel to its leaves, the fall to its colors, the winter to us.”
― Herta Muller

“Don't bite till you know if it's bread or stone.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

“People like pretty things. When you’re pretty, everybody wants to look at you, they want to touch you. I wanted that for myself. Prettiness means value. But some people never experience that personally.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“The sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us, are also a shield—sometimes the last one—against madness”
― Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

“Again and again we picture ourselves sitting together with the people we feel drawn to all our lives, precisely these so-called simple people, whom naturally we imagine much differently from the way they truly are, for if we actually sit down with them we see that they aren't the way we've pictured them and that we absolutely don't belong with them, as we've talked ourselves into believing, and we get rejected at their table and in their midst as we logically should get after sitting down at their table and believing we belonged with them or we could sit with them for even the shortest time without being punished, which is the biggest mistake, I thought. All our lives we yearn to be with these people and want to reach out to them and when we realize what we feel for them are rejected by them and indeed in the most brutal fashion.”
― Thomas Bernhard, The Loser

“Intense love always leads to mourning.”
― Louise Gluck, The Triumph of Achilles

“No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“Nadie debería acercarse mucho a alguien, y lo que se ha dicho tampoco debería acercase a lo que uno quiere decir.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, Al margen / Cita

“The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me--I have no others.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete

“Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding, and you don't even know which lives came before and which is your life of today, you even mix up your own lives.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina

“And I don’t believe in this materialism, in this consumer society, in this capitalism, in this outrageous horror that happens / takes place here…. I really do believe in something, and I call it “a day will come.” And one day it will come. Well, probably it won’t come, since they’ve always destroyed it for us…. It won’t come, and I believe in it anyway. Because if I can’t believe in it anymore then I can’t write anymore either.”
― Ingeborg Bachmann

“perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poem
from the last years of her life that begins
"I lose my screams"
dear Antigone,
I take it as the task of the translator
to forbid that you should ever lose your screams”
― Anne Carson, Antigonick

“You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Woodcutters

“Con las palabras en la boca aplastamos tantas cosas como con los pies sobre la hierba. Pero también con el silencio.”
― Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums

“I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.”
― Louise Gluck

“As I drank my coffee, I listened attentively, but I heard nothing. I thought, maybe this is because there’s too much noise in my world.”
― Can Xue

“In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.”
― Edna O'Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

“You have to pick the places you don't walk away from.”
― Joan Didion

“La diferencia es simple. La religión consiste en creer y la filosofía, en dudar.”
― Aki Shimazaki, Hôzuki, la librería de Mitsuko

“Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.”
― Louise Glück

“We should write as we dream; we should even try and write, we should all do it for ourselves, it’s very healthy, because it’s the only place where we never lie. At night we don’t lie. Now if we think that our whole lives are built on lying-they are strange buildings-we should try and write as our dreams teach us; shamelessly, fearlessly, and by facing what is inside very human being-sheer violence, disgust, terror, shit, invention, poetry. In our dreams we are criminals; we kill, and we kill with a lot of enjoyment. But we are also the happiest people on earth; we make love as we never make love in life.”
― Helene Cixous

“I am familiar with the impatience we feel when forced to suspend the enchantment of solitude.”
― Fleur Jaeggy, Le statue d'acqua

“When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.”
― Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (European Perspectives: a Series in Social Thought & Cultural Ctiticism)

“Mold started to grow in my ears because no one ever spoke to me”
― Yōko Tawada, Memoirs of a Polar Bear