Quote

Time expands and contracts. When it expands, it’s like pitch: it folds people in its arms and holds them forever in its embrace. It doesn’t let us go so easily. Sometimes you go back again to the place you’ve just come from, stop and close your eyes, and realize that not a second has passed, and time just leaves you there, stranded, in the darkness

Banana Yoshimoto

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Banana Yoshimoto
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: July 24
Essayist
Novelist
Prosaist
Writer
Bunkyo
Yoshimoto Banana
Place
Realize
Holds
Back
Second
Passed
Come
Realizing
Leaves
Sometimes
Stop
Easily
Stranded
Time
Eyes
Embrace
Expands
Like
Forever
Close
Folds
People
Eye
Darkness
Pitch
Doesn
Arms
Contracts

More quotes by Banana Yoshimoto

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Things look different depending on your perspective. As I see it, fighting to bridge those gaps isn't what really matters. The most important thing is to know them inside and out, as differences, and to understand why certain people are the way they are.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Good tea is eloquent enough, it turns out, to change a person's mind.
Banana Yoshimoto
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I love feeling the rhythm of other people's lives. It's like traveling.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Was that what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities?
Banana Yoshimoto
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People aren't overcome by situations or outside forces. Defeat comes from within.
Banana Yoshimoto
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There are many, many difficult times, god knows. If a person wants to stand on her own two feet, I recommend undertaking the care and feeding of something. It could be children, or it could be house plants, you know? By doing that you come to understand your own limitations. That's where it starts.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Sometimes people put up walls, not to keep others out, but to see who cares enough to break them down.
Banana Yoshimoto
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I never tell my boyfriend that I'm busy when I'm not. No matter how effective they are, cheap techniques like that just don't agree with me. So it's always okay, it's always all right. In my opinion the surest way to hook a man is to be as open with him as possible.
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It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I'd miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I'm sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Every time I look into his eyes I just want to take the ice cream or whatever I've got in my hand and rub it into his face. That's how much I like him.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Me, when I'm utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody's home, then I despise my own life - my birth, my upbringing, everything.
Banana Yoshimoto
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I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.
Banana Yoshimoto
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I was happy. I loved the night, I loved t so much it almost hurt. In the night everything seemed possible. I wasn't sleepy at all.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by 'their happiness' is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That's not a bad thing.
Banana Yoshimoto
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She was still there inside me now, just as she always was: a life put on hold, a memory I didn't know how to handle.
Banana Yoshimoto
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Inching one's way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can't take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself into the heart: I know about that
Banana Yoshimoto
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Of course, it’s true that sometimes the pink at sunrise somehow seems brighter than the pink at sunset, and that when you’re feeling down the the landscape seems darker too - you see things through the filter of your own sensibility. But the things themselves, out there, they don’t change. They existed, and that’s all there is to it.
Banana Yoshimoto
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It was at once a miracle and the most natural thing in the world.
Banana Yoshimoto
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In the uncertain ebb and flow of time and emotions much of one's life history is etched in the senses.
Banana Yoshimoto
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The ritual of our daily lives permeate our very bodies.
Banana Yoshimoto