“In this world, there are things you can only do alone, and things you can only do with somebody else. It’s important to combine the two in just the right amount.”
—Haruki Murakami
March 2011
“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”
—Jack Keruoac
“When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it — or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don’t suppose many people try to do it.”
—Dodie Smith
“Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I’m thankful for it. It’s like that frozen pain and my very existence are one. The pain is an anchor, mooring me here.”
—Haruki Murakami
“No matter what they wish for, no matter how far they go, people can never be anything but themselves. That’s all.”
—Haruki Murakami
“I tried to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston
“But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm down. They can’t ever stop howling.”
—Margaret Atwood
“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”
—Ian McEwan
“Was everyone else really as alive as she was?…If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.”
—Ian McEwan
“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
—Ian McEwan
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
—Jack Kerouac
“He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.”
—Douglas Adams
“Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in – an interesting hole I find myself in – fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.”
—Douglas Adams
