Arch > Arch's Quotes

“The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers' guns, the day the bodies of those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of the column, I was startled to discover an absence in side myself: the absence of fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean...the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“And yet, I've heard stories of wild dogs who would defend a stranger on the road to their last breath, simply because that person threw a crumb instead of a rock.”
― Julie Kagawa, Shadow of the Fox

“Well, we use words to communicate, right? Still, most of our words don’t actually get across. You know what I mean? Well, our words might, but not what we’re actually trying to say. That’s what we’re always dealing with. We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“After you died I could not hold a funeral,
And so my life became a funeral.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Irrationality. I found the thought faintly pleasurable. Or rather, I felt at ease with it. What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.”
― Osamu Dazai

“Thrones make tyrants of us all. (Vortalis, A Conjuring of Light)”
― Victoria Schwab

“If you're writing primarily for one person besides yourself, I'd advise you pay very close attention to that person's opinion (I know one fellow who says he writes mostly for someone who's been dead fifteen years, but the majority of us aren't in that position). And if what you hear makes sense, then make the changes. You can't let the whole world into your story, but you can let in the ones that matter the most. And you should.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.”
― Stephen King

“How do you forgive the people who are supposed to protect you? Sometimes, I don't know what I miss more; everything I've lost or everything I never had.”
― Courtney Summers, Sadie

“Abuse elicits so many memories of trauma that embed themselves into behavior that is hard to shake. It could be something that happened forty years ago, but it remains alive, present. When you're clutching to live, morals go out the window.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“I never let myself forget that every single person I meet is a member of this human race. And that includes you, professor, listening to this testimony. As it includes myself.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“Conscience.
Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.”
― Han Kang

“Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.”
― Han Kang, Human Acts

“If you want to know how poor somebody was growing up, ask them how many windows they had. Don't ask what was in their fridge or in their closet. The number of windows says it all. It says everything. If they had none, or maybe one or two, that's all you need to know.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Listen, if there is a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“My life was life a dusty shelf in a old bookstore, where every volume was exactly where it had been for ages, the only discernible change being that my body has aged another ten ages.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“Even if something happens to us, even if we die and never have to deal with them again, the same thing will happen to someone, somewhere. The same thing. The weak always go through this, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Because the strong never go away. That’s why you want to pretend to be like them, isn’t it? You want to join them.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“We’re all so small, and have such little time, unable to envision the majority of the world.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs

“The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now," she said to the other women in the closet.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“Abuse elicits so many memories of trauma that embed themselves into behavior that is hard to shake.”
― Viola Davis, Finding Me

“Those who cannot own their choices will always be mastered by fate.”
― Katy Rose Pool, There Will Come a Darkness

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart