Maria > Maria's Quotes

“Everything men do repulses me.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Inevitably, with memory comes pain.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

“They’re taught to believe that their penises make them superior, and that women are just there for them to use as they see fit. Then they go out into the world, where everything centers around them and their dicks. And it’s women who have to make it work. At the end of the day, where is this pain that men feel coming from? In their opinion: us. It’s all our fault—whether they’re unpopular, broke, jobless. Whatever it is, they blame women for all of their failures, all their problems.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“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

“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”
― Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night

“Don’t be afraid to love someone. When you fall in love, I want you to fall in love all the way. Even if it ends in heartache, please don’t live a lonely life without love. I’ve been so worried that because of what happened you’ll give up on falling in love. Love is wonderful. I don’t want you to forget that. Those memories of people you love, they never disappear. They go on warming your heart as long as you live. When you get old like me, you’ll understand.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“Seasons flow in a cycle.
Life too, passes through difficult winters.
But after any winter, spring will follow.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Tales from the Cafe

“I feel like maybe I should use up all my sadness now while I'm young. So, I don't end up all miserable when I'm old.”
― Nanae Aoyama, A Perfect Day to Be Alone

“For me, love is something else entirely. It’s beyond all logic and impossible to describe or define. It’s one thing to like someone. To be consumed, body and soul, by desire is quite another. That’s what love is to me — desire that’s all-consuming. Desire that’s impossible to resist!”
― Sabahattin Ali, Madonna in a Fur Coat

“Why are we always the ones running away and you are the ones chasing after us? Why is it always that we surrender and you take the spoils? Why is it that even in the way you beg, there is dominance, and pity in the way we refuse?”
― Sabahattin Ali

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Perhaps he's reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future and you've made it this far, please remember: You will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive a man as a woman. It's difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest. Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom. Who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lay down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who CAN do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

“No matter where I am, I feel no sense of reality.”
― Suzumi Suzuki, Gifted