Grace

“Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs.

It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted?”
― Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“It is the age of the wound more than its depth and overgrowth that makes it painful. To be torn open again and again in the same wound channel, to see the wound that has been operated on countless times taken under treatment again, this is what is awful.”
― Franz Kafka

“At a certain level of self-awareness and under other accompanying circumstances favorable to observation it will necessarily happen regularly that one finds oneself abhorrent. Every standard of the good-however varied the opinions on it may be will appear too great.
One will realize that one is nothing but a rat hole of wretched ulterior motives. Not the slightest action will be free of these ulterior motives.

These ulterior motives will be so filthy that in a state of self-observation one will at first not even want to think them through, but rather content oneself with the sight of them from a distance. These ulterior motives will not consist merely of selfishness, compared to them selfishness will appear to be an ideal of the good and the beautiful. The filth one will find will be there for its own sake, one will recognize that one came into the world dripping with this burden and due to it will depart unrecognizably or all-too-recognizably. This filth will be the bottommost depth one will find, the bottommost depth will contain not lava but filth”
― Franz Kafka

“The difficulties I have with speaking, certainly incredible to other people, stem from the fact that my thinking or rather the contents of my consciousness are completely foggy, that as far as it is a question of myself alone, I rest in them undisturbed and sometimes self-satisfied, but that a human conversation requires sharpening, consolidation and continuous coherence, things that do not exist in me. No one will want to lie with me in clouds of fog and even if he wanted to, I cannot drive the fog out of my forehead, between two people it dissipates and is nothing.”
― Franz Kafka