“How many summers had I been alive? The obvious answer was as many summ...” — Mieko Kawakami Quote

“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.”

“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.”

“A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past.”

“Don't forget it's daylight savings time. You spring forward, then you fall back. It's like Robert Downey Jr. getting out of bed.”

“Everything you need is already within you. The beauty of life is that your DESTINY lies always in your hands. The time has come for you to STEP UP and BE GREAT”

“Time flies fast when time is important, and even faster when it is not.”

“Purpose, like time, only exists when observed.”

“Outside the leaves on the trees constricted slightly; they were the deep done green of the beginning of autumn. It was a Sunday in September. There would only be four. The clouds were high and the swallows would be here for another month or so before they left for the south before they returned again next summer.”