john manton > john's Quotes

“Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And so it goes...”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“All experience adds up to a life lived as only you could. I feel sure the day will come when you can say: this is my life.”
― Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean Paste

“The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.”
― Billy Crystal, 700 Sundays

“Don’t be afraid to love someone. When you fall in love, I want you to fall in love all the way. Even if it ends in heartache, please don’t live a lonely life without love. I’ve been so worried that because of what happened you’ll give up on falling in love. Love is wonderful. I don’t want you to forget that. Those memories of people you love, they never disappear. They go on warming your heart as long as you live. When you get old like me, you’ll understand.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“It’s funny. No matter where you go, or how many books you read, you still know nothing, you haven’t seen anything. And that’s life.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“I don’t think it really matters whether you know a lot about books or not. That said, I don’t know that much myself. But I think what matters far more with a book is how it affects you.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“... maybe it takes a long time to figure out what you're truly searching for. Maybe you spend your whole life just to figure out a small part of it."

"I don't know. I think maybe I've been wasting my time, just doing nothing."

"I don't think so. It's important to stand still sometimes. Think of it as a little rest in the long journey of your life. This is your harbor. And your boat is just dropping anchor here for a little while. And after you're well rested, you can set sail again.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“No matter how much time passed, the sadness never went away. I was carrying this feeling around—like there was a gaping hole left open inside me. And instead of disappearing, the emptiness inside me seemed to grow day by day.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“It’s funny. No matter where you go, or how many books you read, you still know nothing, you haven’t seen anything. And that’s life. We live our lives trying to find our way. It’s like that Santōka Taneda poem, the one that goes, ‘On and on, in and in, and still the blue-green mountains.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“I had too many ideals and ambitions for one person, and because of that, I ended up without a single one I could hold on to.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“It's only in secondhand books that you can savor encounters like this, connections that transcend time. And that's how I learned to love the secondhand bookstore that handled these books, our Morisaki Bookshop. I realized how precious a chance I'd been given, to be part of that little place, where you can feel the quiet flow of time.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“That’s when I finally realized it wasn’t just a question of where I was. It was about something inside me. No matter where I went, no matter who I was with, if I could be honest with myself, then that was where I belonged.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“Who on earth played this cruel trick on me? The culprit, of course, was me.”
― Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

“Love is like therapy, it only works when you believe in it.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“A famous citation from the American psychotherapist Virginia Satir (1916-1988) reads: 'We need four hugs a day for survival. We need eight hugs a day for maintenance. And we need twelve hugs a day for growth.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“Knowing how to love life is a necessity, Takeshi, and she needs to learn to trust people. Not to hate them, there’s no way out of hate.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“A man once told me that death is a very personal thing...' Suzuki-san said. 'To some extent, we try to build our lives exactly like everyone else's. But not death. Everyone reacts to death in their own way...”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Booth at the Edge of the World

“Sometimes she cried, sometimes she laughed, because life could still be funny, even after a tragedy.”
― Laura Imai Messina, The Phone Box at the Edge of the World