“The thing about results - whether or not something turns out well - is...” — Mieko Kawakami Quote

“The thing about results - whether or not something turns out well - is that it's mostly about luck. Things like that can change. You can make people believe whatever you want. You can fool them like it's nothing. But you can't fool yourself, not really. That's why what matters is how you think about your work in your lifetime, how much you respect it, how hard you're trying.”

“What is dying anyway? I let this impossible question fill the darkness of my bedroom. I thought about how somebody was always dying somewhere, at any given moment. This isn’t a fable or a joke or an abstract idea. People are always dying. It’s a perfect truth. No matter how we live our lives, we all die sooner or later. In which case, living is really just waiting to die. And if that’s true, why bother living at all? Why was I even alive? I made myself crazy, tossing and turning, hyperventilat- ing. Then it hit me: dying is just like sleeping. You only know you’re sleeping when you wake up the next day, but if morn- ing never comes, you sleep forever. That must be what death is like. When someone dies, they don’t even know they’re dead. Because they never see it happen, nobody ever really dies. This hit me like a sucker punch.”

“How many summers had I been alive? The obvious answer was as many summers as my age; but for some reason I felt the presence of another number, a different, realer number somewhere out there in the world. I thought about this as I gazed into the summer glare.”

“Sex is sexy, money is sexier, spirituality is sexiest – the conscious gratification.”

“There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere. They are different and yet they are the same. The success has this over his rivals: He knows where he is going.”

“Straight-A students without good manners or etiquette are like a sharp knife without a handle, dangerous and useless.”

“Time helps those who are present,”

“Make the comeback the strongest part of your journey. Use adversity as fuel to propel yourself forward.”

“Just do the work and see what comes. If you like a result, accept it graciously, whether it arrives in a sudden flash or after long bouts of difficult, skilled labor.”