Modern Literature Quotes

“Our story began with uncertainty, and with uncertainty, it ended—not with a bang, but a whisper.”
― Aura Biru, We Are Everyone

“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“You will tell me that there always exists a chasm between the world depicted in novels and films and the world that people actually live in. It is the chasm between the world mediated by art and the world unmediated by art, formless and drab. You are absolutely right. The gap that my mother felt was not necessarily any deeper than the gap felt by a European girl who loved books and films. Yet there is one critical difference. For in my mother's case, the chasm between the world of art and real life also symbolized something more: the asymmetrical relationship I mentioned earlier—the asymmetrical relationship between those who live only in a universal temporality and those who live in both a universal and a particular one.

To make this discussion a little more concrete, let me introduce a character named Francoise. Francoise is a young Parisienne living before World War II. Like my mother, she loves reading books and watching films. Also like my mother, she lives in a small apartment with her mother, who is old, shabby looking, and illiterate. One day Francoise, full of artistic aspirations, writes an autobiographical novel. It is the tale of her life torn between the world of art and the world of reality. (Not an original tale, I must say.) The novel is well received in France. Several hundred Japanese living in Japan read this novel in French, and one of them decides to translate it into Japanese. My mother reads the novel. She identifies with the heroine and says to herself, "This girl is just like me!" Moved, my mother, also full of artistic aspirations, writes her own autobiography. That novel is well received in Japan but is not translated into French—or any other European language, for that matter. The number of Europeans who read Japanese is just too small. Therefore, only Japanese readers can share the plight of my mother's life. For other readers in the world, it's as if her novel never existed. It's as if she herself never existed. Even if my mother had written her novel first, Francoise would never have read it and been moved by it.”
― Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“Life is a tiring business indeed.

Soy sauce runs out. Milk runs out. Dishwashing detergent runs out. Lancôme lipsticks—I thought I had stockpiled several years' worth—run out. Dust underneath the dining table becomes dust balls. Newspapers and magazines pile up, and so does laundry. E-mail and junk mail keep coming. When occasion demands, I make myself presentable and I present myself. I listen to my sister's same old complaints on the phone. I withdraw money for my elderly mother, whose tongue works fine but whose body is a mess. I contact her caseworker. And now I have reached a stage in life when my own health is prone to betray me.”
― Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“And yet, as you all know, joining humanity is never a simple matter. By beginning to live the same temporality as Westerners, the Japanese now had to live two temporalities simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Time with a capital "T," which flows in the West. On the other hand, there was time with a small "t," which flows in Japan. Moreover, from that point on, the latter could exist only in relation to the former. It could no longer exist independently, yet it could not be the same as the other, either. If I, as a Japanese, find this new historical situation a bit tragic, it's not because Japanese people now had a live in two temporalities. It's rather because as a result of having to do so, they had no choice but to enter the asymmetrical relationship that had marked and continues to mark the modern world—the asymmetrical relationship between the West and the non-West, which is tantamount, however abstractly, to the asymmetrical relationship between what is universal and all the rest that is merely particular.”
― Minae Mizumura, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“She knows he is there now, hedgehogged in terror. Like someone whose arm has been amputated, so, since they cut the umbilical cord, she keeps feeling him swimming and kicking in the placenta of the world, which as always is filled with gold fish and singing dolphins but also alligators and leeches and all sorts of mollusks. And people who in the blink of an eye turn into telescreens.”
― Corinna Hasofferett, A Minyan of Lovers

“I dared to look at eternity
and I lost all hope;
for the things I keep
are fading
and the ones I never called mine
outgrew my own mind.”
― Laura Chouette

“When I was young,
I only painted flowers;
Once I became older
I learnt that flowers meant hope.
We give them when we meet someone
for the first home,
and we give them
to bury someone, as a final goodbye.”
― Laura Chouette

“Whatever has the nature of arising has the nature of ceasing.
(The Buddha)”
― Alex Fan Moniz, Journeys on the Underground and Beyond

“The truth! The truth!
Some minds wrote about -
and yet - no truth;
So I dared to write -
but still there was no truth;
So I call on truth itself,
for it is known
and yet does not write;”
― Laura Chouette

“When we paint, we paint with truth -
and when live, we live without;
so we dream and yet not sleep
for sleep takes our dreams
and does not trade it with doubt.”
― Laura Chouette

“When we paint, we paint with truth -
and when live, we live without it;
so we dream and yet not sleep
for sleep takes our dreams;”
― Laura Chouette

“I dared to look at eternity
and I lost all hope.”
― Laura Chouette

“What we outlive
becomes our prison -
eventually.”
― Laura Chouette

“Poetry is the heart of the soul.”
― Laura Chouette

“My soul is made out of poetry.”
― Laura Chouette

“Change is beautiful inside a world made out of constant expectations.”
― Laura Chouette

“How magnificent a lifetime feels once it is held together by something that is worth loving.”
― Laura Chouette

“I do believe
that the Catholic Church
is too brocken
to be saved by faith -
it would take true believe
to build something like it again.”
― Laura Chouette

“I’m starving of myself.”
― Laura Chouette

“Art: an earnest love for an immortal lie.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Our souls are not meant to outlive pain;
they are created for carrying broken hearts
further than any other living thing ever can.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“The colours may change
but the sky stays the same.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“Loneliness is a part of life -
not the end of it.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“We all live with our own lies -
that is why somebody else’s truth
changes so much.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie

“We've carried too far 
every broken heart.”
― Laura Chouette, Profound Reverie