Shauwea > Shauwea's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“I just put my heart into it. That's the difference. It's a question of attitude. If you really work at something, you can do it, up to a point. If you really work at being happy, you can do it, up to a point...Anything more than that is luck.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“They weren't fact. They were possibility. Nothing more, nothing less, but the force of the possibility was shattering.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“It might look simple, but it never is. It's just like a root. What's above ground is only a small part of it. But if you start pulling, it keeps coming and coming. The human mind dwells deep in darkness. Only the person himself knows the real reason, and maybe not even then.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance

“I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I would read. I would explore”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I was not scared of anything, when I read my book...”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“You get on with your own life. Lettie gave it to you. You just have to grow up and try and be worth it.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“Different people remember things differently, and you'll not get any two people to remember anything the same, whether they were there or not. You stand two of you lot next to each other, and you could be continents away for all it means anything.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”
― Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

“But we're lost in a world of appearances now.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure - the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit - is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough -- or I misunderstood what strength was.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“From the beginning, then, but briefly.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I've discovered over the years that the simplest explanation is almost always the right one; and that hunger of one kind or another - desire, by another name - is the source of almost every sorrow.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front, but I didn't really care, because there were two big exam questions I wanted to be sure I answered fully: the question of art, and the question of love.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“So: now a new year, a new beginning. I've vowed not to complain. I'm too good at it, and need to practice other skills. I've also vowed to work very hard...”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“I wish it hadn't happened; but what good does this do? I can wish it wouldn't happen again - but here too, if I'm wishing the impossible, it will do no good at all.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“It was one of those moments when life's disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is "useful to get that learned.”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“...a strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food....”
― Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs

“There's something ugly about the flawless.”
― Dennis Lehane, Sacred

“Things are what they are, and whatever will be, will be.”
― Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

“Never try to out-drink a Swede, unless you happen to be a Finn or at least a Russian.”
― Jonas Jonasson, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared