commonplace
com·mon·place book
a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.
/ˈkämənˌplāsˌbóok/
noun
No Longer Human – Osamu Dazai
“When anyone ever criticized me, I felt certain that I had bveen living under the most dreadful apprehension.”
— pg. 27
“Anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror.”
— pg. 28
“The idea of being respected used to intimidate me excessively.”
— pg. 33
“Women found in me a man who could keep a love secret.”
— pg. 38
“What a messy business it is to be fellen for by the more literary. What easiness lies in being loved.”
— pg. 47
“Though outside lay the sea of irrationality it was far more agreeable to swim in its water until presently I drowned.”
— pg. 67
“I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.”
— pg. 74
“When aa man becomes half-mad, he will shakle and shake until he’s free of a woman.”
— pg. 8
“I felt as though the vessel of my suffering had become empy, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.”
— pg. 168
“Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes.”
— pg. 169
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong
“I am writing you from inside a body that usedto be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son.”
— pg. 10
“When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
— pg. 12
“You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I — which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is whyI have taken God’s loneliest creation and put you inside it.”
— pg. 14
“Despite their vastly different paths, they found themselves transplants in a decadent and disorientating city besieged by bombing raids. It was in this familiar happenstance that they found refuge in each other.”
— pg. 45
“I’m breaking us apart again so that I might carry us somewhere else—where, exactly, I’m not sure, just as I don’t know what to call you—white, Asian, orphan, American, mother.”
— pg. 62
“I hate and love your battered hands for what they can never be.”
— pg. 81
“You were okay that day. You even smiled twice through the cigarette smoke. I remember it. I remember it all because how can you forget anything about the day you first found yourself beautiful?”
— pg. 107
“I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?”
— pg. 139
“Tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.”
— pg. 156
“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
— pg. 176
“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
— pg. 187
“I considered the stars, the smattering of blue-white phosphorescence, and wondered how anyone could call the night dark.”
— pg. 188
“Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything bt the harm we’re capable of.”
— pg. 192
“I was a gaping wound in the middle of America and you were inside me asking, ‘Where are we? Where are we baby?'”
— pg. 229
“What were you before you met me?
I think I was drowning
And what are you now?
Water.”
— pg. 238
“If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly.”
— pg. 238
“Without moving your head, you look at me, the way. amother looks at anything—for too long.”
— pg. 242
Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
“When morning comes, once again I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.”
— pg. 21
“Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.”
— pg. 26
“I was indifferent to the whole thing and had never really given it any thought. And here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn’t.”
— pg. 37
“You gave me the flow of time, with morning, afternoon, and night… Without you, I would probably have lived my life without ever being aware that a period of time called morning even existed.”
— pg. 171
book balms! 