"Eventually soulmates meet, for they have the same hiding place."
"No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep. It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. ‘Hold tight,’ I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to."
— Haruki Murakami, Sleep
"We got into bed and held each other, kissing as the sound of rain filled our ears. Then we talked about everything from the formation of the universe to our preferences in the hardness of boiled eggs."
— Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
"The thing I like most about time is it is not real. It’s all in the head. There is no such thing as the past; it exists only in the memory. There is no such thing as the future; it exists only in our imagination. If all the watches were truly accurate the only thing they would ever say is: Now."
— Damien Echols
"How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."
"I asked her if she believed in love, and she smiled and said it was her most elaborate method of self-harm"
— Benedict Smith
"I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. LIke I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself - as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself."
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
"‘Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star,’ I said. ‘It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.’"
— Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
"I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder."
— Zelda Fitzgerald, in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Something changes the moment you decide you’ve found a person you are ready to reveal parts of your soul to. Something stands out and makes the moment unique. A profound multidimensional clarity resembling a piece of carefully gathered stardust; As if you are whispering “finally” and your eyes fill with light and spontaneity. As if you do not care whether your heart will melt or crumble in the process because your brief courage undoes your tremendous fear of disbelief. You live for these moments; For you are, maybe for one second or more, sweetly forced to surrender yourself to unconditional intimacy. A moment of psychological reward smashing all self-imposed disciplines founded on terror. This is all you need."
— Anaïs Nin
