Quote collection
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"When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly."
"I didn't have much to say to anybody but kept to myself and my books. With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw it's fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy."
"With luck, it might even snow for us."
"I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me."
"Everything in life is a metaphor."
"You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough."
"you mean machines are like humans?" I shook my head. "No, not like humans. With machines the feeling is, well, more finite. It doesn't go any further. With humans it's different. The feeling is always changing. Like if you love somebody, the love is always shifting or wavering. It's always questioning or inflating or disappearing or denying or hurting. And the thing is, you can't do anything about it, you can't control it. With my Subaru, it's not so complicated."
"Like flowers scattered in a storm, a man's life is a long farewell."
"You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get."
"Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you"
"It is sometimes necessary for each person. Fill up with delicious food, get drunk, sing loudly and chat frivolously."
"To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all."
"I collect records. And cats. I don't have any cats right now. But if I'm taking a walk and I see a cat, I'm happy."
"As long as there's such a thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later."
"Even castles in the sky can do with a fresh coat of paint."
"So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent."
"The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings."
"Distance might not solve anything, no matter how far you run."
"What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with."
"Only the dead stay seventeen forever."