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Quotes by Japanese Authors
"Safe sex is an act of self love."
"April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn't talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this."
"All through the years since World War II, the Japanese people have, I am convinced, made strenuous efforts to preserve and promote world peace, contributing to the progress and prosperity of mankind."
"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf."
"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."
"And I really wanted to see you, too," she said. "When I couldn't see you any more, I realized that. It was as clear as if the planets all of a sudden lined up in a row for me. I really need you. You're a part of me; I'm a part of you."
"Motivation may be what starts you off, but it's habit that keeps you going back for more. Are your habits working for you or against you? Are your habits helping you to achieve your goals or hindering the process?"
"They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn't care what happened. I want to live! I told myself. I will live. I will get out of this insane netherworld and get back my stolen memories back and live. Forget the end of the world, I was ready to reclaim my whole self."
"I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means."
"Our faces were no more than ten inches apart, but she was light years away from me."
"Go out and do your thing knowing that rejection and failure is an inevitable and integral part of the process to achieving your dreams."
"There's a profit attached to every problem. Find it, face it and fix it."
"There are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life,' Eri finally said. 'And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn't anticipated arises instead. It's not that easy to get free of them. That's true for you - and for me, too."
"With our writings, we can right the world."
"The sky both exists and doesn't exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn't. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in."
"Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free."
"Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on."
"The unity of Nigeria will only come if we overcome and overgrow tribe, materialism and selfish human nature."
"The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you're that age, it will cause you pain when you're older."
"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."
"That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time."
"Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn't lead to anything."
"If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation."
"I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me?"
"And then it struck him what lay buried far down under the earth on which his feet were so firmly planted: the ominous rumbling of the deepest darkness, secret rivers that transported desire, slimy creatures writhing, the lair of earthquakes ready to transform whole cities into mounds of rubble. These, too, were helping to create the rhythm of the earth. He stopped dancing and, catching his breath, stared at the ground beneath his feet as though peering into a bottomless hole."
"Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything's possible when it comes to love."
"Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match."
"If I do tell you the story, the two of us will always share it. And I don't know if that's the right thing to do. if I lift open the lid now, you'll be implicated. Is that what you want? You really want to know something I've sacrificed so much trying to forget?"
"They say it's a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers - and I'm talking the most talented - are able to pull off the irrational synthesis you find in dreams."
"O.K., so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working class that gets exploited. What the hell kind of revolution have you got just tossing out big words that working-class people can't understand? What the hell kind of social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions."
"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."
"Don't underestimate the power of a mind that is made up."
"Contrary to the common misconception that loving yourself equates to being self-absorbed and lacking empathy or consideration for others, the true meaning of self-love is about caring, respecting and knowing yourself, taking responsibility for your life, and ultimately, your happiness."
"The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories."
"Wasn't it better if they kept this desire to see each other hidden within them, and never actually got together? That way, there would always be hope in their hearts. That hope would be a small, yet vital flame that warmed them to their core-- a tiny flame to cup one's hands around and protect from the wind, a flame that the violent winds of reality might easily extinguish."
"A relationship that violates values is simply headed for crisis."
"Preparation position you for prosperity."
"Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything."
"Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death."
"I'd swallow some whiskey and listen to the waves while I thought about Naoko. It was too strange to think that she was dead and no longer part of this world. I couldn't absorb the truth of it. I couldn't believe it. I had heard the nails being driven into the lid of her coffin, but I still couldn't adjust to the fact that she had returned to nothingness."
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