The Lake Quotes

“This is what it means to be loved... when someone wants to touch you, to be tender...”
― Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake

“A secret, if it’s kept, can be sweet and comforting, but once it leaks out it can turn on you with a vengeance.”
― Yasunari Kawabata, The Lake

“A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.

Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.

"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. “It is beautiful. But it makes people sick.”

To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.

And then, last week.”
― Megan Abbott, The Fever

“One can’t stop and suddenly speak to a complete stranger, can one?......When it happens I could die of sadness. I feel somehow empty and drained....”
― Yasunari Kawabata

“Luôn luôn giữ ấm bụng, thả lỏng con tim và cơ thể để máu đừng bốc lên đầu. Hãy sống như một bông hoa con nhé. Đó là quyền lợi. Là việc nhất định con có thể làm khi hãy còn sống. Chỉ cần như thế thôi.”
― Banana Yoshimoto

“Yes, those were the things we took for granted.”
― Bianca Bellová, Jezero

“Dedicated to people on the road.”
― Bianca Bellová, The Lake

“The Lake made a rippling ceiling over our heads, and I would lie dreamily watching the fractured moonlight through the water and the small fish that darted back and forth like the glint of a needle.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“Now that I know how many people there are in the world, I can see how it might have been lonely growing up under the Lake. We lived in the ruins of what must have been a vast civilization, long since sunk beneath the waves. We went to the surface rarely, and always under my mother’s guidance; even then, the nearest villages were many miles away, and in my entire childhood I saw them only a handful of times. But back then, I never thought of it. My whole world was the drowned city, with its crumbling chambers and flooded corridors”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood