Gigg > Gigg's Quotes

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.”
― Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu

“It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.”
― John Updike, My Father's Tears and Other Stories

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”
― José Saramago, Blindness

“The thing about getting older is that you don't need everything to be possible any more, you just need things to be certain.”
― Monica Ali, Brick Lane

“Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read.”
― Raymond Carver

“Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― William Faulkner

“Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“We are not all born at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth.”
― Mary Austin

“Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey. But, sorrow is at least an arriving. ”
― Alan Paton

“Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be.”
― Temple Grandin

“I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“She thought of the library, so shining white and new; the rows and rows of unread books; the bliss of unhurried sojourns there and of going out to a restaurant, alone, to eat.”
― Maud Hart Lovelace, Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown

“I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?”
― Jean Kerr

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, even if for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place. If that were true, then maybe he should be happy he was hollow.”
― Haruki Murakami

“When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.”
― Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies

“Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.”
― Clare Boothe Luce

“我們不妨回頭檢視：「禮儀」在人類學中的發展史兩個人伸出手，互相緊握，代表友誼，而這些動作在心理上的意義卻是：我告訴對方，我用來持武器的那雙手，裡頭是空空的，請您檢查；而對方也作了同樣的宣示。透過我們互相的確認，我們認定了彼此沒有攜帶武器，而是真的要來談判的。禮貌在心理上意義，就是敵意的遮掩⋯”
― 陳俊欽, 黑羊效應

“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“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

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant

“Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”
― Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“And also don’t forget, the reason opportunity is often missed is that it usually comes disguised as hard work.”
― Clifford Irving, Trial