“Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still.”
Kafka on the Shore (2002)
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Haruki Murakami 655
Japanese author, novelist 1949Related quotes
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
Variant: Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever.
Source: All the Light We Cannot See
“But, I nearly forgot, you must close your eyes otherwise you won't see anything”
Also attributed to Chester Bennington (singer of Linkin Park)
“Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye.”
Variant translation: Close your bodily eye, that you may see your picture first with the eye of the spirit. Then bring to light what you have seen in the darkness, that its effect may work back, from without to within.
Quoted in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany (1996) by Fredrick Berwick and Jürgn Klein, and in "Culture: Caspar D. Friedrich and the Wasteland" by Gjermund E. Jansen in Bits of News (3 March 2005) http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/154/42/
undated
Context: Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards. A picture must not be invented but felt. Observe the form exactly, both the smallest and the large and do not separate the small from the large, but rather the trivial from the important.
“Don’t go chattering to the stars if you’re going to do it with your eyes closed.”
Source: Nova (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 197)