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"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."
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"Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories - cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful."

"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June" . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"

"On that terrible day, a nation became a neighborhood. All Americans became New Yorkers."

"She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death."

"She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her."

"...because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds."

"Sabotage isolated them from their home, thwarting any hope of outside help. Frantic, unreliable sightings of frightening things " horrible things - led to chaos. The crew, terrified, opted to die fighting and went hunting for their attacker. Kaine's only regret was that they found it. It killed them all.Systematically."
Explore more quotes by Haruki Murakami

"Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other's breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments."

"When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. 'Mythomania' is the word for it."

"I had several girlfriends, but nothing lasted. I'd date one for a few months, and then start thinking: This isn't what I want."

"Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane."

"If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever-something I couldn't afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they're seventeen."

"But still," Ayumi said, "it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.""You may be right," Aomame said, "But it's too late to trade it in for another one."

"When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want."

"In the novelist's profession, as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics' praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What's crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you've set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away. When it comes to other people, you can always come up with a reasonable explanation, but you can't fool yourself. In this sense, writing novels and running full marathons are very much alike."

"Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It is like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. Things will go where they are supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it is time for them to be hurt. Life is like that."
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