“It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass.”
Source: Postcards From the Edge
“This part of the story is about the gaze and what it felt like in my body to look at someone who looked back at me, to see and be seen. All I wanted was to be seen.”
“Reconciliation is the pursuit of the impossible -
and upside-down world where those who are powerful have relinquished that power to the margins”
Source: I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
“The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, war occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty. And yet, I remember, it was in Rennes prison where they had me locked up in May 1940, because I had committed the crime of thinking such a society was my enemy, unless it was simply because it had forced me like so many others to defend it twice in my life when I felt nothing in common with it.”
Source: Death to the Pigs and Other Writings
“Once again, everything had changed on them. Perhaps it was all this changing that made her sad.”
Source: Homecoming
“I find only sadness and melancholy when I wade through the past, even when revisiting good memories. The past is gone; I can neither grasp it nor reshape it. Therefore, I must force my eyes to look toward the future where my mortal powers thrive.”
Source: Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year
“The month of travelling neither lifted my spirits nor softened the blow of Naoko's death. I arrived back in Tokyo in pretty much the same state in which I had left.”
Source: Norwegian Wood
“Pain makes you fearless.”
Source: The Weight on Skin
“I woke up one day and realized?--I am just tired. Not in a desperate way, not from a quitters point of view. This is different. It's the taste of disappointment. Over-whelming disappointment. In life, in situations, in experiences, in other people...but most of all? In my own God-damned self.”
“It’s the best I have,” he said in earnest.
“I know,” she whispered, not ungrateful but with woe unfeigned. “It just isn’t good enough. Not today.”
Source: Being Bold: Quotes, Poetry, & Motivations for Every Day of the Year