Inga Inga > Inga's Quotes

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Sometimes it feels like that’s all I’m doing every time I reach out—trying to haunt, to drag him back in time, asking him to tell me again what happened. Make me understand it once and for all. Because I’m still stuck here. I can’t move on.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I need it to be a love story. I need it to be that.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“He’s the only person who ever understood that desire. Not to die, but to already be dead.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Break his heart? I try to imagine myself having that power, holding his heart, mine to abuse, but even when I picture it pulsing and pumping in my hands, it´s still the boss of me, leading me around, jerking me this way and that with me clinging and unable to let go.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“That dark, dingy, cobwebbed basement had taken all my life from me. That place was where I gave myself up, destroyed my own will for him, and now it was gone. My will was dead, so I might as well be dead.”
― Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger

“I was afraid that if I did anything at all without bartering for at least some small thing in return, he might think I enjoyed it, and not understand that I paid a huge price to myself.”
― Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger

“I also read that spending time with a pedophile can be like a drug high. There was this girl who said it’s as if the pedophile lives in a fantastic kind of reality, and that fantasticness infects everything. Kind of like they’re children themselves, only full of the knowledge that children don’t have. Their imaginations are stronger than kids’ and they can build realities that small kids would never be able to dream up. They can make the child’s world… ecstatic somehow. And when it’s over, for people who’ve been through this, it’s like coming off of heroin and, for years, they can’t stop chasing the ghost of how it felt. One girl said that it’s like the earth is scorched and the grass won’t grow back. And the ground looks black and barren but inside it’s still burning.”
― Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger

“Dysfunctional love, dysfunctional discipline, dysfunctional education, dysfunctional human relations. At first, everybody wonders how something like that could happen to such a nice family; but when you poke around a bit the dysfunction comes out, and then you see that it was bound to happen, that it was only a matter of time.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“In the end, it was the very fact of my existence that she couldn’t stand.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“No form of revenge could have made me hate you any less. If I had cut the two of you to shreds with a knife, I think I would have hated the little pieces of you just the same. I realized that revenge was never going to wash away what had happened, never going to make me stop hating you with every ounce of my being.”
― Kanae Minato, Confessions

“It was as if a tiny crack had opened somewhere in him and was growing, tearing him to pieces. If he had simply been angry, I might have found a way to calm him, but I had no idea how to put him back together once he came apart.”
― Yōko Ogawa, Hotel Iris

“The blades touched my abdomen. A cold shock ran through me, and my head began to spin. If he had pressed just a bit harder, the scissors might have pierced my soft belly. The skin would have peeled back, the fat beneath laid bare. Blood would have dripped on the bedspread.”
― Yōko Ogawa, Hotel Iris

“…Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning—something different from what he had before, at least a different world.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“…In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“She drank like a drowning man helplessly swallowing sea water, in accordance with some law of nature. To ask for nothing means that one has lost one’s freedom to choose or reject. Once having decided that, one has no choice but to drink anything — even sea water….

Afterwards, however, Etsuko felt none of the nausea of a drowning person. Until the moment of her death, it seemed, no one would know she was drowning. She did not call out — she was a woman bound and gagged by her own hand.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“Нет ничего, что превышало бы силу страсти. Однако мирские страсти подвержены выветриванию. А повинны в этом желания и надежды.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“I guess that’s what makes people do horrible things – they think whatever they’re doing isn’t nearly as bad as what somebody else will do”
― Eric LaRocca, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“I only do this because there are people out there who will do far worse to you.”
― Eric LaRocca, Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a blank, unreadable mask.”
― Ryū Murakami, Audition

“...what is romance, but a mutual pact of delusion? When the pact ends, there's nothing left.”
― Zoe Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“Things that are truly innocent don’t need to be labelled as such.”
― Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal]

“People who love horror films are people with boring lives... when a really scary movie is over, you're reassured to see that you're still alive and the world still exists as it did before. That's the real reason we have horror films - they act as shock absorbers - and if they disappeared altogether, I bet you'd see a big leap in the number of serial killers. After all, anyone stupid enough to get the idea of murdering people from a movie could get the same idea from watching the news.”
― Ryu Murakami, In the Miso Soup

“They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But there's no reason a child commits murder, just as there's no reason a child gets lost. What would it be - because his parents weren't watching him? That's not a reason, it's just a step in the process.”
― Ryū Murakami, In the Miso Soup