Tish > Tish's Quotes

“Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return. All other giving is selfish. But he is being selfish a little, isn’t he, by wanting her to love him in return? He hopes that she loves him in return. Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?”
― Alan Lightman, Reunion

“Randolph Henry Ash: “What is it? My dear?”
Christabel LaMotte: “Ah, how can we bear it?”
Randolph Henry Ash: “Bear what?”
Christabel LaMotte: “This. For so short a time. How can we sleep this time away?”
Randolph Henry Ash: “We can be quiet together, and pretend – since it is only the beginning – that we have all the time in the world.”
Christabel LaMotte: “And every day we shall have less. And then none.”
Randolph Henry Ash: “Would you rather, therefore, have had nothing at all?”
Christabel LaMotte: “No. This is where I have always been coming to. Since my time began. And when I go away from here, this will be the mid-point, to which everything ran, before, and from which everything will run. But now, my love, we are here, we are now, and those other times are running elsewhere.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“Only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“He knew her, he believed. He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture which mistrusted love, 'in love', romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about polymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I want you always to remember me. Will you remember that I existed, and that I stood next to you here like this?”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it -- to be fed so much love I couldn't take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Letters are just pieces of paper," I said. "Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

Watanabe: Wow, and did your search pay off?

M: That's the hard part. I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“What happens when people open their hearts?"
"They get better.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene, I hardly paid it any mind. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression, certainly never imagined that eighteen years later I would recall it in such detail. I didn't give a damn about the scenery that day. I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about the beautiful girl walking next to me. I was thinking about the two of us together, and then about myself again. It was the age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. The scenery was the last thing on my mind.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“She's letting out her feelings. The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you're in big trouble.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I guess I've been waiting so long I'm looking for perfection. That makes it tough."

"Waiting for perfect love?"

"No, even I know better than that. I'm looking for selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don't want it anymore and throw it out the window. That's what I'm looking for.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“So what’s wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I wonder what ants do on rainy days?”
― haruki murakami, Norwegian Wood

“I don't care what you do to me, but I don't want you to hurt me. I've had enough hurt already in my life. More than enough. Now I want to be happy.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for and to do it so unconsciously.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Waiting for your
answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At
least let me know whether or not I hurt you.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly.
From something like that or it doesn't begin at all.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“You can't stop time. You can't capture light. You can only turn your face up and let it rain down.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“Anything can happen. But what goes wrong isn’t your fault. You can’t spend the rest of your life tiptoeing around to try and avert disaster. It won’t work. You’ll just end up missing the life you have.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter

“Grief, it seemed, was a physical place.”
― Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper's Daughter