Chris > Chris's Quotes

“HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”
― Arkady Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic

“Great men die twice, once when they leave this world and a second time when their life work disappears.”
― Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina

“Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe. So at least I won’t be alone.”
― Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“My destiny is fulfilled. My blood is all gone. My veins are empty. I die.”
― Ahmad Kamal, Land Without Laughter

“- He was our commander not because someone appointed him but because we picked him to be our commander. He was a brave man, tall, six feet eight perhaps, and strong. He wasn’t afraid of anything. We looked up to him, all of us. And when I saw him lying there, without legs, crippled and totally helpless … I felt terrible.
- Did it perhaps occur to you to quit at that moment?
- No, it didn’t, once you’re inside you cant get out, you cant quit”
― Slavenka Drakulić, The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

“Death's an old story, but new for each person.”
― Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Children: Introduction by John Bayley

“What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle.”
― Haruki Murakami, After Dark

“Okay. He says there’s no death; it’s an illusion. Time is an illusion. Every instant
that comes into being never passes away. Anyhow—he says—it doesn’t really even come into being;
it was always there. The universe consists of concentric rings of reality; the greater the ring the more
it partakes of absolute reality. These concentric rings finally wind up as God; He’s the source of the
things, and they’re more real as they get nearer to him. It’s the principle of emanation, I guess. Evil is
simply a lesser reality, a ring farther from Him. It’s the lack of absolute reality, not the presence of an
evil deity. So there’s no dualism, no evil, no satan. Evil is an illusion like decay.”
― Philip K. Dick, Counter-Clock World

“Hardly anything in this life is settled. Things that happen once will go on happening. But they come back in different guises, and that's what fools us.”
― Natsume Soseki

“Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself demanded for its fulfillment that I should forget about the conditions of my existence, and that I should abandon what for me constituted the only barrier to love, namely the belief that I could not be loved. I had always thought of desire as being something clearer than it really is, and I had not realized that it required people to see themselves in a slightly dreamlike, unreal way.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness.”
― Ivo Andric

“Does pain go away and leave no trace, then?’
‘You sometimes even feel sentimental for it.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes

“When you're held by the dead, you begin to feel that you aren't in this world yourself.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, Thousand Cranes