Krista

“I’d heard somewhere that a mammal’s heart beats about two billion times during its lifetime. For example, the life expectancy of an elephant is about fifty years. For horses it’s twenty years, and cats ten years, while a mouse will last only for about two years. But whatever the average life span, each animal’s heart beats around two billion”
― Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World

“I suppose loneliness is another thing that only human beings feel. But looking at my mother’s smiling face in those old photos makes me think that perhaps loneliness is the reason that we can feel other feelings.”
― Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World

“His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Éa, which is the oldest song, it is said, “Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea