There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.
Haruki MurakamiRead
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There are ways of dying that don't end in funerals. Types of death you can't smell.
Isn't it a characteristic of the age we live in that it has made everyone in a way a migrant and a member of a minority?
For it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free.
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.
Patience and boredom are closely related. Boredom, a certain kind of boredom, is really impatience. You don't like the way things are, they aren't interesting enough for you, so you deccide- and boredom is a decision-that you are bored.
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.
America is proud of what it does to its writers, the way it breaks and bedevils them, rendering them deluded or drunken or dead by their own hands. To overpower its tender spirits makes America feel tough. Careers are generally short.
...this is the way fate usually treats us, it's right there behind us, it has already reached out a hand to touch us on the shoulder while we're still muttering to ourselves, It's all over, that's it, who cares anyhow.
I guess I just couldn't see standing there -- alive, talking, thinking, breathing, being -- one second, and dead the next. It really bothered me. Death by violence isn't the same as dying any other way, accident or disease or old age. It just ain't the same.
Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewelers.
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.
He was a thorough good sort; a bit limited; a bit thick in the head; yes; but a thorough good sort. Whatever he took up he did in the same matter-of-fact sensible way; without a touch of imagination, without a sparkle of brilliancy, but with the inexplicable niceness of his type.
She wasn't ready to settle down, she told her friends. That was one way of putting it. Another was would have been that she had not found anyone to settle down with. There had been several men in her life, but they hadn't been convincing. They'd been somewhat like her table - quickly acquired, brightened up a little, but temporary. The time for that kind of thing was running out, however. She was tired of renting.
You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way.
It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect... It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players - more if they are moderately restless.
...religion is a tool to bind people together, to strengthen their unity, but like every tool, it can be mismanaged, even used in opposition to the way it should.
What I learned most from my father wasn't anything he said; it was just the way he behaved. He loved his work so much that, whenever he came on set, he brought that with him, and other people rose to it.
I feel to invite women everywhere to rise to the great potential within you. I do not ask that you reach beyond your capacity. I hope you will not nag yourselves with thoughts of failure. I hope you will not try to set goals far beyond your capacity to achieve. I hope you will simply do what you can do in the best way you know. If you do so, you will witness miracles come to pass.
Look at him now, poor fellow. That's what a dose of reality does for you...Never touch the stuff myself, you understand. Find it gets in the way of the hallucinations.
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