Brooke > Brooke's Quotes

“She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.”
― Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“The world of the grotesque is the darkness within us. Well before Freud and Jung shined a light on the workings of the subconscious, this correlation between darkness and our subconscious, these two forms of darkness, was obvious to people. It wasn’t a metaphor, even. If you trace it back further, it wasn’t even a correlation. Until Edison invented the electric light, most of the world was totally covered in darkness. The physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two. They were directly linked. Like this.” Oshima brings his two hands together tightly. "But today things are different. The darkness in the outside world has vanished, but the darkness in our hearts remains, virtually unchanged. Just like an iceberg, what we label the ego or consciousness is, for the most part, sunk in darkness. And that estrangement sometimes creates a deep contradiction or confusion within us.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’
Like a little lost Sputnik?’
I guess so.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Deep down, the young are lonelier than the old.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperience youth to feel itself quite alone the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Closing the gate on her oldest fears as she had closed the gate of her own fenced yard, she discovered the wings she'd always wished she had.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.”
― Lewis Carroll , Alice in Wonderland

“So many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“It's bad enough wasting time without killing it.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“There are no wrong roads to anywhere.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“...I'll continue to see things as a child. It's not so far to fall.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“But I suppose there's a lot to see everywhere, if only you keep your eyes open.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“What you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”
― Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth

“Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

“Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”
― Charles Dickens