10 Favourite Love Quotes

Here’s 10 of my personal favourites:

“I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once. ”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

“Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves”
― Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate

“For I am the daughter of Elrond. I shall not go with him when he departs to the Havens: for mine is the choice of Luthien, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“It is that happy stretch of time when the lovers set to chronicling their passion. When no glance, no tone of voice is so fleeting but it shines with significance. When each moment, each perception is brought out with care, unfolded like a precious gem from its layers of the softest tissue paper and laid in front of the beloved — turned this way and that, examined, considered.”
― Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

“The moment you stop to think about whether you love someone, you’ve already stopped loving that person forever.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.”
― Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

And in the end, I leave you with the most heartbreaking love poem by Pablo Neruda, placed to incredible violin, watch here.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage … a review

So I moved and obviously, now I have a new library. I found the latest Murakami and was very pleased. Of course, I’m not pleased now that he didn’t win the Nobel But that’s a separate post.  This latest book, about Tazaki’s life and how he has to face the ghosts of his adolescence when he’s spurred on by his girlfriend, is a very different read from the usual. There isn’t even a cat!

Of course, there are dreams, and strange unrealities, and a parallel Universe, but they are not the crux of the plot. There IS an actual plot, so that’s quite a change as well. Murakami is a very versatile author and he seems to be experimenting a bit here. It worked for me. The storyline takes the protagonist into the deep recesses of his past and through in the future to Finland. There is a strange familiarity in the style of writing, like a cup of tea with an old friend. There is also the slow paced suspense of finding out how someone’s life changes based on which way the book goes. I really liked the character of the girlfriend – she is kind, compassionate, organised, and fun. I think I identified  with her a bit.

The end is quite open, but depending on who you are as a person, your mind is bound to lead you one way or another. The author sort of hints at a possibility and leaves you, as a reader, to make up the rest. I liked this book 🙂

Teaser Tuesday (March 18)

My teaser:

“Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you–you should control them.“

From (Vintage 2007) of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Enjoy!

Teaser Tuesday (March 11)

My teaser:

“There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.“

From (Vintage 2007) of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman.

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Enjoy!

Happy Birthday, Haruki Murakami!

A post from last year…

Undoubtedly one of my favourite authors, he makes me wish I could read Japanese. He is a true God of magic realism, my favourite genre of writing. People like Marquez are on my list too, but I do believe that it is much harder to be this imaginative in today’s world, monotonous and black-and-white.

Murakami began writing fiction when he was 29. “Before that”, he said, “I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all.” Can you imagine, waking up one day, and producing masterpieces? His tales look at such minor nuances of human nature, the complexities of love, the surrealism of existence…

This picture, though it trivializes his work to a great degree, always brings a smile to my face; it is so representative of his work! I love how he deals with everyday object and turns them into things with life, much like how I think.

🙂

My recommendations would include Sputnik Sweetheart (my favourite), Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark. Of course, 1Q84 has been on everyone’s radar for a while and is a good read as well. If you are not the voracious I-can’t-fall-asleep-without-reading kind of person, then try The Elephant Vanishes, it too has all the elements of his longer novels.

Live a long life. And keep writing!

Musing Mondays (October 28)

My Musing:

I read everything from fantasy to thrillers to war-based, from romance to historical fiction to travelogues. I enjoy mixing it up and I try to not read the same genre for too long. This stems from the fact that there’s is always too much that I want to read and I almost never manage to make enough time. Especially now, since, I want to spend some time concentrating on my writing process as well. Of all the kind of fiction I read, my favourite genre is Magic realism, a genre where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment. One example of magic realism occurs when a character in the story continues to be alive beyond the normal length of life and this is subtly depicted by the character being present throughout many generations. (Wiki)

Some of the best stuff I’ve read include works by Marquez and Murakami. Especially brilliant are:

• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Of Love and Other Demons
• After Dark
• Sputnik Sweetheart
• Like Water for Chocolate

While this is just from the top of my head, this is a good list that I frequently refer to.

What’s your favourite genre? Can you even pick one?

Musing Mondays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…

Describe one of your reading habits.
Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
What book are you currently desperate to get your hands on? Tell us about it!
Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!

Musing Mondays (October 14)

My Musing:

Most of you may have heard of Alice Munro winning the Nobel for Literature this year. While I was slightly disappointed that Murakami didn’t win, I’m also willing to give this lady a fair try. So, if you too are interested, this is where you can read some of her short stories. I am going to sample them to see if I like what she writes, if I do, then I’ll buy her books.

Musing Mondays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week…

Describe one of your reading habits.
Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
What book are you currently desperate to get your hands on? Tell us about it!
Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!

Friday Find

Happy Birthday, Anais Nin!

She is not very famous. I discovered her by pure chance, for she writes the kind of stuff that people usually classify as cheap. Common themes are women’s sexuality, art, music, and the heady combination of all those. She is fantastic! The way she explores the little talked about domain of women’s needs and desires, the way she puts into words those emotions, those feelings, candidly, yet without sounding cheap is commendable.

Murakami is another author who does that really well, but at the end of the day, he is a man and I do believe that this is something the writing of which would need an experience. Also, her works are far more graphic, intended for a much more mature reader.
According to Wikipedia, and the reference is to Otto Rank, one of Freud’s circle of psychoanalysts. He was her psychotherapist I believe…

“Rank, she observes, helped her move back and forth between what she could verbalize in her journals and what remained unarticulated. She discovered the quality and depth of her feelings in the wordless transitions between what she could say and what she could not say. “As he talked, I thought of my difficulties with writing, my struggles to articulate feelings not easily expressed. Of my struggles to find a language for intuition, feeling, instincts which are, in themselves, elusive, subtle, and wordless”.

 

Happy Birthday, Haruki Murakami!

Undoubtedly one of my favourite authors, he makes me wish I could read Japanese. He is a true God of magic realism, my favourite genre of writing. People like Marquez are on my list too, but I do believe that it is much harder to be this imaginative in today’s world, monotonous and black-and-white.

Murakami began writing fiction when he was 29. “Before that”, he said, “I didn’t write anything. I was just one of those ordinary people. I was running a jazz club, and I didn’t create anything at all.” Can you imagine, waking up one day, and producing masterpieces? His tales look at such minor nuances of human nature, the complexities of love, the surrealism of existence…

This picture, though it trivializes his work to a great degree, always brings a smile to my face; it is so representative of his work! I love how he deals with everyday object and turns them into things with life, much like how I think.

🙂

My recommendations would include Sputnik Sweetheart (my favourite), Kafka on the Shore, and After Dark. Of course, 1Q84 has been on everyone’s radar for a while and is a good read as well. If you are not the voracious I-can’t-fall-asleep-without-reading kind of person, then try The Elephant Vanishes, it too has all the elements of his longer novels.

Live a long life. And keep writing!