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Quote by Murasaki Shikibu

Work

The Tale of Genji

Written by Murasaki Shikibu, this novel is considered a foundational work of Japanese literature, offering a detailed look into the lives of the Heian court elite during the 11th century. more

Author

Murasaki Shikibu
Murasaki Shikibu

The author of 'The Tale of Genji,' a renowned female novelist from the Heian period of Japan, born around 973 AD. more

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“Neither my deeds contain any essence nor, my gestures have sense of zeal, my days are creeping forth for nothingness; with this body deficient of heart and soul O' Glorious! O' Lord Almighty ! how can I come close to you?”

“Bella. "Nathan Malone is dead." He caught her shoulders, shook her. "No!" she screamed back. And she couldn't hit him. She wanted to, and she couldn't. "look at me," he yelled. "Look at me, Bella. What happened killed the man you loved. All that is left is this. The man you see now.The name name I carry now. Anything else is no possible." "No!" She pulled away from him, stumbled to her feet, and shook with the rage pounding through her. "The name may be dead, but you are not dead. "You weren't just a SEAL," she cried. "You weren't just a friend, or a son, or a grandson, or a brother. You weren't just a warrior." She clenched her fists, pressed to her stomach as the agony swell up through every cell of her body. "You are my husband. My lover. It doesn't matter if your name is Nathan, Noah, or hey fucking you, you are my my lover. My soul. My heart.”

“St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.”

“But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in the mating pair have become indistinguishable. Before their merger, they each yearned for the other; as they part, they part from the self. The very quality that attracted them to each other is also, inevitably, destroyed in their union.”