26 Quotes by Laura Imai Messina

We need to possess joy in abundance before we can bestow it on somebody else.

Grief, Yui had once told him, is something you ingest every day, like a sandwich cut into small pieces, gently chewed and then calmly swallowed. Digestion was slow.And so, Takeshi thought, joy must work the same way.

It is a passing of forms from one lifeto another.A concert in whichonly the orchestra changes.But the music remains, it's there.[Marianagela Gualtieri]

Once hope changes direction, it loses its way and can no longer return.

As children we see happiness in things. A toy train sticking out of a basket or the plastic film around a slice of cake. Or a photograph of a scene in which we are at the center, all eyes on us.As adults it gets more complicated. Happiness is success, work, a man or a woman. All vague, laborious things. Whether it's a word we use in relation to our lives or not, it's mostly just that, a word.

And when happiness is a thing, anything that threatens its safety is the enemy.

...[Yui] concluded that memories were like objects, like the soccer ball that was found on the coast of Alaska a year after the tsunami, 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.Sooner or later, they always floated back to the surface.

If Yui had to describe this feeling, this pain, she would say it was like the stabbing contractions that preceded childbirth, the wonder of the process she had experienced when her daughter was born: closing to open again, contracting to then dilate, clamp and hold, then spread your legs wide and push.A total paradox, essentially, like one of those things you only find when you've stopped looking for it. Like love, true love, or children that won't come.

Ecco come nasceva la gioia. Era una parola restituita, che sempre le avrebbe ricordato il prima, e avrebbe cementificato il dopo.