If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.
Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.
I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.
I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I’m thankful for it. It’s like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.
For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a “Reserved” sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact that I was sure I’d never see her again.
Maybe it’s just hiding somewhere. Or gone on a trip to come home. But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you. Who knows — maybe even tomorrow.
Love can rebuild the world, they say, so everything’s possible when it comes to love.
People fall in love without reason, without even wanting to. You can’t predict it. That’s love.
Time expands, then contracts, all in tune with the stirrings of the heart.
A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else.
Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but loose you.
Quizás aun no te comprenda. Pero, con un poco de tiempo, llegaré a entenderte. Y no habrá nadie en el mundo que te comprenda mejor que yo.
Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.
No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories.
Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.
In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.
Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.
When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Life is not like water. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.
Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.
That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.
Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.
Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.
People soon get tired of things that aren’t boring, but not of what is boring.
Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.
It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.
Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.
It’s easy to forget things you don’t need anymore.
When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.
When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t. And when they’re running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.
Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.
Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.
Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.
I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all.
It’s easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit.
Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless.
Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power.
If you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like, I wouldn’t worry about it.
The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I’ve ever met.””You’ve met God?””Certainly. I telephone Him every night.
In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God’s kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance.
Es decir…, lo que yo creo es que el hombre piensa en el significado de la vida porque sabe con certeza que va morir algún día. (…) Nadie sabe lo que va a ocurrir. Por eso nosotros, para evolucionar necesitamos la muerte.
With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy.
There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.
Don’t blame me. That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.
We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something – with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.
This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.
People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.
Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?””I guess it depends on how you die.
Aren’t you afraid of dying?Not really. I’ve watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.
Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.
Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
I’m not afraid to die. What I’m afraid of is having reality get the better of me, of having reality leave me behind.
That’s the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything’s dark and you can’t see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive.
I’ve never once thought about how I was going to die,” she said. “I can’t think about it. I don’t even know how I’m going to live.
I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place – death.
Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn’t seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.
Aku akan bahagia jika aku dan lari bisa menua bersama.
Luka fisik memang diperlukan saat mempelajari sesuatu yang penting dalam hidup.
In those days I used to talk to myself as if reciting poetry.
There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.
If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.
It just happens to be the way that I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
If she did experience sex–or something close to it–in high school, I’m sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They’ve got plenty of life to lead inside their own context.
I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
That’s how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o’clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.
You like to write. It’s the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.
My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left. I remember exactly where I set down each and every one of them, and how I felt when I did. Short stories are like guideposts to my heart…
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
I love pop culture — the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That’s why I said I don’t like elitism.
Writing things was important, wasn’t it? Nakata asked.’Yes, it was. The process of writing was important. Even though the finished product is completely meaningless.
You know what I should do?” Hoshino asked excited. “Of course,” the cat said. “What’d I tell you? Cats know everything. Not like dogs.
It’s just a feeling I have. What you see with your eyes is not necessarily real. My enemy is, among other things, the me inside me.
Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.
Things change everyday. With each new dawn, it is not the same world as before. And you’re not the same person you were either.
Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.
For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured.At least by the person who’s waiting.
Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted.
Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.
I guess time doesn’t flow in order, does it – A, B, C, D? It just sort of goes where it feels like going.
The passage of time will usually extract the venom of most things and render them harmless
Time does not expand.””But time is actually expanding, isn’t it? You yourself said that time adds up.””That’s only because time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn’t change. It’s only that you can see more movies.
Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me.
When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on ‘What would happen to the world if there was no friction?’ Answer: ‘Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.’ That was my mood.
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
There weren’t any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn’t fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
Have books ‘happened’ to you? Unless your answer to that question is ‘yes,’ I’m unsure how to talk to you
The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older.
The journey I’m taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I’m seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.
A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea
From the moment of my birth, I lived with pain at the center of my life. My only purpose in life was to find a way to coexist with intense pain.
It’s not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that’s not read friendship.
When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.
I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.
Can’ttrustpeople. Won’tdoanygood. They’llkillyoueverytime. They’llkilleachother. They’llkilleveryone.
People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned.
I all of a sudden got to feeling like talking to people. Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean. I’m weird like that.
Listen up – there’s no war that will end all wars.
I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.
In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality.
Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you–you should control them.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But it was not until much later that I was able to get any real sleep. In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.
Don’t tell me anymore. You should have your dream, as the old woman told you to. I understand how you feel, but if you put those feelings into words they will turn into lies. (from Thailand)
Have your dream…What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)
If only I could fallsound asleep and wake up in my old reality!
I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can’t work out what’s real and what isn’t… That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I’m saying?
It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.
Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where – at a special time and place – imagination had been set free.
All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?
I don’t think I’d want Mickey Mouse pimping for me anyway.
I don’t have a thing,” Tengo said, “except my soul.””Sounds like a job for Mephistopheles,” she said.
a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime
For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.
The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil – they’re all fluid and in transition. They don’t stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.
With jealousy, a parasite takes root in your heart. It becomes a cancer that eats away at your soul.
People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That’s what can move the world. That’s art.
I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.
I’m alone inside the world of the story, my favorite feeling in the world.
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. ”― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: ‘At the time, no one knew what was coming.
Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind to yourself.
Not just beautiful, though–the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.
Surfing’s a more profound kind of sport than it looks. When you surf, you learn not to fight the power of nature, even if it gets violent.
Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I’m thankful for it. It’s like that frozen pain and my very existence ar
Losing you is most difficult for me, but the nature of my love for you is what matters. If it distorts into half-truth, then perhaps it is better not to love you. I must keep my mind but lose you.
Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.
Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.
Rock and roll was my favorite, but before long I grew to enjoy Shinamoto’s brand of classical music. This was music from another world, which had its appeal, but more than that I loved it because she was a part of that world.
No, I don’t want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don’t like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can.
When you’re always scheming about ways to make money, it’s like a part of you is lost.
There is nothing in this world that never takes a step outside a person’s heart.
Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.
the mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed–your self. You must believe in your own powers.
The mind is strong. It survives, even without thought. Even with everything taken away, it holds a seed—your self.
That’s the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain.
Money had no name, of course. And if it did have a name, it would no longer be money. What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.
Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.
I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.
Mr. Nakata, this world is a terribly violent place. And nobody can escape the violence. Please keep that in mind. You can’t be too cautious. The same holds true for cats and human beings.
The real world—where I probably could never be happy, and never get anywhere.
Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl – as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response.
But you knoe, she’s right. Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it’s utterly precious.
What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.
Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.
When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that’s the real world.
The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.
Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.
It’s a funny thing sensing someone else’s sex drive. After a while, you get to mistaking it for your own.
Sex with a married woman ten years his senior was stress free and fulfilling, because it couldn’t lead to anything
Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?
The music world is where child prodigies go to die.
In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be.
Exactly. When is comes to anything halfway important, you just don’t get it. It’s amazing to me that you can put a piece of fiction together”Yeah, well, that’s a whole different thing.'(from Honey Pie)
Memory is like fiction: or else it’s fiction that’s like memory.
Memory is like fiction: or else it’ fiction that’s like memory.
The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend.
Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum– the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided.
It was as if – this something I thought of only later, of course – she was gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person’s heart, a very sensual feeling.
There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can’t. And time passing is one thing that can’t be redone. Come this tar, and you can’t come back.
There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can’t. And time passing is one thing that can’t be undone. Come this far, and you can’t go back.
It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person’s heart, a very sensual feeling.
It was as if – this something I thought of only later, of course – she were gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person’s heart, a very sensual feeling.
The laugh left a bitter taste in our mouths, but we laughed out all the same.
Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the world is made up of all kinds of people. Other people have their own value to live by, and the same holds true with me.
What I was chasing in circles must have been the tail of the darkness inside me.
Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system
Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it might go on
What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.
A person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.
With each passing moment I’m becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.
At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.
You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath.
Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle.
Dreams are things from the past. They aren’t from the future. That wasn’t you imprisoned there. You imprison your dreams. You understand?Yeah, I’d say. But I wasn’t convinced.
Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn’t happen right away.
When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.
The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.
It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.
Sometimes we don’t need words. Rather, it’s words that need us.
I’ve been clinging to this world like a discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch, about to be blown off forever by a gust of wind.
That’s how lonely and sad I was. Dying is not that hard. Lime the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me. When you feel like rhat, dying doesn’t seem like such a big deal.
I was a vacant room. Inside, the music produces only a dry, hollow echo.
The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed – everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast.
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells
Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I’ll do some thinking. Ob—la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.
I don’t know much about the world, but I do know one thing for sure. If I’m pessimistic, then the adults in this world who are not pessimistic are a bunch of idiots.
It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films.
I want to write stories that are different from the ones I’ve written so far, Junpei thought: I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love.
I never trust people with no appetite. It’s like they’re always holding something back on you.
Guns are like cars: you can trust a good used one better than one that’s brand new.
I might have been afraid that if I really loved someone and needed her, one day she might suddenly disappear without a word, and I’d be left all alone.
Maybe you didn’t want to get married, or get tied down?’Tsukuru shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think that was it. I’m the sort of person who craves stability.
He sometimes wondered if she had become involved with him just so that she could cry in someone’s arms. Maybe she can’t cry alone, and that’s why she needs me.
I need to learn not just to forget but to forgive.
Each memory was now the shadow of a shadow of a shadow. The only thing that remained tangible to him was the sense of absence.
For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can’t see.
We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear.
I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.
Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.
Besides being the world the kind of sadness that can not be expressed in tears. You can not explain it to anyone. Unable to take any shape, settles quietly in the bottom of the heart as snow during the windless night.
April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn’t talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this.
She and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start
Nights without work I spent with whisky and books.
He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.
I’d like to have a good long talk with you once you’ve calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.
Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound.
I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.
The whole terrible fight occured in the area of imagination. That is the precise location of our battlefield. It is there, that we experience our victories and defeats.
I just gave them a little scare. A touch of psychological terror. As Joseph Conrad once wrote, true terror is the kind that men feel towards their imagination. (from Super-frog Saves Tokyo)
The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves
Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends.
And you came to Finland to build a station?””No I came here on vacation to visit a friend.””That’s good,” the driver said. “Vacations and friends are the two best things in life.
For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.
Unsure how to answer, I took another grape. Time was no problem for me, but I wasn’t eager to hear the long life story of a dwarf. And besides, this was a dream. It could evaporate any moment.
That’s my dream. It’s always the same. Always. Every little detail. And every time I have it, it’s just as scary as the last.(…)It’s so real, I feel as if I’ve already died hundreds of times.
I don’t dream. Come to think of it, i haven’t had any dreams in a long time.
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.
Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.
You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.Sara looked directly into his eyesI nothing else, you need to remember that. you can’t erase history, or change it. it would be like destroying yourself.
Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere then evaporated, leaving only memory.
The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. … It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell.
But still,” Ayumi said, “it seems to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness.””You may be right,” Aomame said, “But it’s too late to trade it in for another one.
all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody’s reach. A place beyond the flow of time.
No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura
The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.
I am afraid to die, though,’ I whispered to myself. These turned out to be my last words. They were not very impressive words, but it was too late to change them.
People think of all kinds of things at three in the morning. We all do. That’s why we each have to figure out our own way of fighting it off.
I feel as if the world is listening for my next thought. But I can’t think of anything. Sorry, but I just can’t think of anything.
There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again.
Don’t forget – you’re the one who swam across the freezing sea at night.
I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials.
I watched the moon alone, unable to share his cold beauty with anyone.
Sometimes I feel as if I’m racing with my own shadow
I guess I’ve been waiting so long I’m looking for perfection. That makes it tough.
Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness
I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.
The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter
History cannot be erased or altered.Because that would mean killing yourself.
people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is guess from what comes floating to the surface every once in a while
I was the chain that bit into my ankle, and I was the ruthless guard that never slept.
You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them
But thing in the past are like plate that’s shattered to pieces. You can never put it back together like it was, right?
That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution
If something came out of the deal, it couldn’t make things any worse for us than they already were, I thought. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hell has no true bottom.
I’m going to live to be twenty-five,’ she said, ‘then die.
There are three reasons I failed. Not enough training. Not enough training. And not enough training.
If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.
My father always told me: ‘Give somebody a hand and he’ll take an arm.
What happens when people open their hearts?””They get better.
…somewhere, on some subterranean level, her darkness and his may have connected.
In truly deep darkness, all kinds of strange things were possible.
There was a time when my soul was wandering through the deepest darkness…
You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction.
To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.
If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.
It’s not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There’s a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does.
The power to concentrate was the most important thing. Living without this power would be like opening one’s eyes without seeing anything.
We’re on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That’s all.
It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical
Wasn’t much of a life anyway. Wasn’t much of a brain.””But didn’t you say you were satisfied with your life?””Word games,” I dismissed. “Every army needs a flag.
Sad hotels existed everywhere, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphin Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic.
When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person that walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.
He felt as if his heart had dried up. I needed her he thought. I needed someone like her to fill the void inside me. But I wasn’t able to fill the void inside her. Until the bitter end, the emptiness inside her was hers alone.
Its Barnum & Bailey world just as phony as it can be,But it would’t be make-believe if you believed in me
Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.
As if a great creature had grown old without being able to express its feelings. Not that it didn’t know how to express them, but rather it didn’t know what to express.
…most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.
Each “way of thinking” has its own shape and color, which wax and wane like the moon.
Hatred is like a tow-edged sword. When you cut the other person, you cut yourself.
Once the ego is born into this world, it has to shoulder morality.
Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.
People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.
No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away.
There are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.
I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas – if I like these things, why should I apologize?
I wasn’t able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But there was something wrong between us from the start, as if we’d done the buttons up wrong.
All the same, writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.
He decided not to ask for details. Better to avoid exposing his ignorance even further.
She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines.
I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.
A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.
It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it…..The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.
I shouted into the phone, but there was no reply. Silence floated up from the receiver like smoke from the mouth of a gun.
Sometimes I just get tired. I get headaches, and I just lose track. I mean, it’s like which is me and which is the role? Where’s the line between me and my shadow?
She was seriously in love, but she never made demands.
My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning.
I don’t know, it’s stupid being 20,” she said. “I’m just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody’s pushing me from behind.
I don’t deserve a girl like Hatsumi,” Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him.
Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event?
If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn’t, go for the one without form. That’s my rule.
People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us know anything substantial about the other.
People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither if us know anything substantial about the other.
I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.
The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let’s leave doubt for tomorrow,” Komatsu said. “That is the point.
Nobody chooses to evolve. It’s like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what’s happening until they hit, then it’s too late.
I love you,” I said to her. “From the bottom of my heart. I don’t ever want to let you go again. But there’s nothing I can do. I can’t make a move.””Because of her?”I nodded.
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.
So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.
Our faces were no more than ten inches apart, but she was light years away from me.
Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood.
That’s what we all do : endlessly take the long way around.
At the same time that ‘I’ am the content of a relation, ‘I’ am also that which does the relating.
Certain kinds of information are like smoke: they work their way into people’s eyes and minds whether sought out or not, and with no regard to personal preference.
We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy.
Hey, you know that thing Dostoyevesky wrote on gambling? It’s like that. When you’re surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.
It seemed unreasonable, unfair, that a woman so young and beautiful should be so exhausted. Of course, it was neither unreasonable nor unfair. Exhaustion pays no mind to age and beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.
Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.
To wit, existence is communication and communication is existence.
Civilization is communication. When that which should be expressed and transmitted is lost, civilization comes to an end.
Like boarding a train running parallel. That’s what disappearing is.
Nobody’s going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can’t always be in the fast lane.
If I choose to write about sheep, it’s just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance.
You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does.
Making up for lost time?” “Yes,” I say. “A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back.” “In order to keep on li
Making up for lost time?””Yes,” I say. “A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back.” “In order to keep on living.”I
Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in.
I have a lot more patience for others than I have for myself, and I am much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That’s just the kind of person I am. I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.
Tengo had a gift for such work. He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game.
I study the chessboard and concede defeat.”You can gain yourself in five moves” says the Colonel. “Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.
Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible.
The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.
Even if things were the same, people’s perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter.
The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground
Like someone excitedly relating a story, only to find the words petering out, the path gets narrower the further I go, the undergrowth taking over.
Stop agreeing with everything I say! It’s not as if you’re going to solve everything by admitting your mistakes. Whether or not you admit then or not, mistakes are mistakes.””It’s true,” I said. It -was- true.
All I know is I’m totallyalone. All alone i n an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.
Where there’s guts, there’s curiosity, and where there’s curiosity, there’s guts.
Your “scared” and my “scared” are two different things.”What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked.’As you get older, you don’t recover from things so easy.”As you get older, you also get tired?”Yeah,’ I said, ‘you get tired.
I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.
Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.
The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
To Tengo, sexual desire was fundamentally an extension of a means of communication. And so, to look for sexual desire in a place where there was no possibility of communication seemed inappropriate to him.
The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night.
All he could do was wait like this, patiently, until it grew light out and the birds awoke and began their day. All he could do was trust in the birds, in all the birds, with their wings and beaks.
It’s true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night,” the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. “You can’t fight it.
A strange, terrific force unlike anything I’ve ever experienced is sprouting in my heart, taking root there, growing. Shut up behind my rib cage, my warm heart expands and contracts independent of my will–over and over.
Unless you find the fundamental cause and treat that, the same problem will surface later on in a different form.
I don’t think it’s right that I’m part of the problem. I can’t be part of the solution if I’m part of the problem
Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems.
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might be a few — very few, I would imagine- who are impressed by it, but rarely would anyone like it.
Maybe that’s why people don’t like you. You make it obvious you don’t care whether people like you or not. That makses some people angry.
Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.
Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said.“Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.
Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.
It is very simple, actually. It is because you and Tengo were so powerfully drawn to each other.
Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.
Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it may go on. The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell.
The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,
No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.
No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.
I’m not totally mad at you. I’m just sad. You’re all locked up in that little world of yours, and when I try knocking on the door, you just sort of look up for a second and go right back inside.
If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.
Girls who are on top of things must have three hundred ways of responding to tired thirty-five-year-old divorced men.
They say it’s a dangerous experiment to include dreams (actual dreams or otherwise) in the fiction you write. Only a handful of writers – and I’m talking the most talented – are able to pull off the irrational synthesis you find in dreams.
The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.
I don’t think it’s a question of liking or disliking it,” Tengo said…”It was the one thing he was best at.” “Hmm. I see,” Kumi said. She pondered this. “But that might very well be the best way to live your life.
It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But anything more than that you can’t. Anything more than that is luck.
You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, through, you’ll never go hungry.
In response to my father-in-law’s view, I offered no opinion. He was not looking for my opinion. He had merely been spouting his belief, a conviction that would remain unchanged for all eternity.
I’m your phantom dance partner. I’m your shadow. I’m not anything more.
I dream, sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.
The world’s crawling with stupid, innocent girls, and I’m just one of them, self-consciously chasing after dreams that will never come true.
The early autumn sun glinted on the water, an enormous mirror ground to powder and scattered.
I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom of it all.
IT’s not death. It’s eternal life. And you get’t’be yourself. Compared to that, this world isn’t but a momentary fantasy. Please don’t forget that.
Looking at the ocean makes me miss people, and hanging out with people makes me miss the ocean.
Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.
He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course – the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was.
Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.
She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.
It’s just that the chaos has changed shape. The giraffe and the bear have traded hats, and the bear’s switched scarves with the zebra.
Loving her, and being loved, was the only way I could hold myself together.
And I really wanted to see you, too,” she said. “When I couldn’t see you any more, I realized that. It was as clear as if the planets all of a sudden lined up in a row for me. I really need you. You’re a part of me; I’m a part of you.
I have a million things to talk to you about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.
Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world.
Too many memories of her were crammed inside of me, and as soon as one of them found the slightest opening, the rest would force their way out in an endless stream, an unstoppable flood.
I think of you now mare than ever. It’s raining today.
Not everybody is looking for a boyfriend with a sports car.
I look around me sometimes and I get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don’t these bastards do something? I wonder. They don’t do a damn thing, and then they bitch.
I had thought about it so often – too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time.
Here I was, seeing you almost every week, and talking with you, and knowing that the only one in your heart was Kizuki. It hurt. It really hurt. And I think that’s why I slept with girls I didn’t know.
You want to know why you felt that way about me even though you didn’t love me.
There was much about him that was fine and beautiful, but he could never find the confidence he needed.
I went on loving him just the same, and I could never be interested in anyone else.
No, it’s not sick. I wish I could be the one to hold you, though, I said. So hold me. Now. Right here.
It’s hard not being able to see you, but my life in Tokyo would be a lot worse if it weren’t for you.
If you think about it, an unfair society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit.
Maybe so, but I’m not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I’m working hard. I’m working ten times harder than you are.
In any case, though, I believe that I have not been fair to you and that, as a result, I must have led you around in circles and hurt you deeply.
It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger
Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth, I answered honestly. Sometimes, if I can’t feel something like the warmth of a woman’s skin, I get so lonely I can’t stand it.
I could never tell what was going on inside the pretty heads of the girls that Naoko brought along, and they probably couldn’t understand me, either.
One thing became crystal clear to me when I couldn’t see you anymore. I realized that the only way I had been able to survive until then was having you in my life. When I lost you, the pain and loneliness really got to me.
I loved Midori. And I had probably known as much for a while. I had just been avoiding the conclusion for a very long time.
I still loved Naoko. Bent and twisted as that love might be, I did love her. Somewhere inside me, there was still preserved a broad, open space, untouched, for Naoko and no one else.
I have always loved Naoko, and I still loved her. But there is a decisive finality to what exists between Midori and me.
Waiting for your answer is one of the most painful things I have ever been through. At least let me know whether or not I hurt you
No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow.
I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.
Slowly like a movie fade out, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favorite feeling in the world.
There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself.
There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream
That’s gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.
A gust of wind set the leaves of grass to dancing and celebrated the grass’s song before it died.
I mean, public libraries like this one were always short of money, so building even the tiniest of labyrinths had to be beyond their means.
But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me.
…All without any more sound than flipping over a playing card. And sitting in this limo, compared to my fifteen-year-old Volkswagen Beetle I’d bought off a friend, was as quiet as sitting at the bottom of a lake wearing earplugs.
I had several girlfriends, but nothing lasted. I’d date one for a few months, and then start thinking: This isn’t what I want.
I know exactly what I’m doing, but I just can’t stop. That’s my greatest weakness.
When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. That’s what I think. It’s just a form of sincerity.
That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.
The second whiskey is always my favorite. From the third on, it no longer has any taste. It’s just something to pour into your stomach.
A person’s last moments are an important thing. Yuou can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how you die.
A person’s last moments are an important thing. You can’t choose how you’re born, but you can choose how to die.
We’re on the same wavelength. We’re connected that way, even if I’m away from her.
I just got my signals crossed. First thing, I have to untangle the connections. Otherwise, I come away empty-handed. Or with someone else’s hands. Or even with a missing hand.
Psychologically speaking (I’ll only wheel out the amateur psychology just this once, so bear with me), encounters that call up strong physical disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of our own faults and weaknesses.
A person’s last moments are an important thing. You can’t choose how you’re born but you can choose how you die.
Act that way and slowly but surely I will fade away. All the dawns and all the twilights will rob me, piece by piece, of myself, and before long my very life will be shaved away completely – and I would end up nothing.
Life’s no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe’s my own to fool with.
You’ve already decided what you’re going to do, and all that’s left is to set the wheels in motion. I mean, it’s your life. Basically, you gotta go with what you think is right.
All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.
I’ll be happy if running and I can grow old together.
Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time. When we pass each other on the road, we listen to the rhythm of each other’s breathing, and sense the way the other person is ticking away the moments.
I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.
I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.
It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the appropriate point in a conversation to say goodbye
You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.
Team sports aren’t my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don’t need a partner to go running, you don’t need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.
I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.
I didn’t read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else.
You are 27 or 28 right? It is very tough to live at that age. When nothing is sure. I have sympathy with you.
I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.
I’ve run the Boston Marathon 6 times before. I think the best aspects of the marathon are the beautiful changes of the scenery along the route and the warmth of the people’s support. I feel happier every time I enter this marathon.
Young people these days don’t trust anything at all. They want to be free.
I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it’s not imagination. It’s just a way of watching.
Among the many values in life, I appreciate freedom most.