Melanie Pieper

“Tea is, in fact, a marvelous drink. To those who spurn it on the grounds of insomnia, I say that it’s better to be deprived of sleep than of tea.”
― Natsume Sōseki, The Three-Cornered World

“That's a good point," Professor Hirota said. "But there is one thing we ought to keep in mind in the study of man. Namely, that a human being placed in particular circumstances has the ability and the right to do just the opposite of what the circumstances dictate. The trouble is, we have this odd habit of thinking that men and light both act according to mechanical laws, which leads to some stunning errors. We set things up to make a man angry, and he laughs. We try to make him laugh, and again he does the opposite, he gets angry. Either way, though, he's still a human being."
Hirota had enlarged the scope of the problem again.
"Well, then, what you're saying is, no matter what a human being does in a particular set of circumstances, he is being natural," said the novelist at the far end of the table.
"That's it," Hirota shot back. "It seems to me that you might create any sort of character in a novel and there would be at least one person in the world just like him. We humans are simply incapable of imagining non-human actions or behavior. It's the writer's fault if we don't believe in his characters as human beings.”
― Natsume Sōseki

“When people felt pain time and time again, they came to fear that pain above all other things. So they tried to ignore it, to forget it was happening, as a way of bearing it. And pretty soon, they would come to feel like they'd accomplished something just by doing that -- even though nothing had changed.”
― Fuyumi Ono, The Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn

“I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending - I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle