01c. 1949 ADA certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
02c. 1949 ADA person’s destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
03c. 1949 ADWith each passing moment I'm becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
04c. 1949 ADAt some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
05c. 1949 ADYou 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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
06c. 1949 ADSamsa 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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
07c. 1949 ADDreams 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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
08c. 1949 ADEverybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
09c. 1949 ADWhen 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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
10c. 1949 ADTell me something, Mari—do you believe in reincarnation?” Mari shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so,” she says. “So you don’t think there’s a life to come?” “I haven’t thought much about it. But it seems to me there’s no reason to believe in a life after this one.” “So once you’re dead there’s just nothing?”“Basically.”“Well, I think there has to be something like reincarnation. Or maybe I should say I’m scared to think there isn’t. I can’t understand nothingness. I can’t understand it and I can’t imagine it.” “Nothingness means there’s absolutely nothing, so maybe there’s no need to understand it or imagine it.” “Yeah, but what if nothingness is not like that? What if it’s the kind of thing that demands that you understand it or imagine it? I mean, you don’t know what it’s like to die, Mari. Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.” “Well, yeah…,” says Mari. “I get so scared when I start thinking about this stuff,” Korogi says. “I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can imagine what you’d look like—a horse, say, or a snail. And even if it was something bad, you might be luckier next time.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
11c. 1949 ADThe 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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
12c. 1949 ADIt is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
13c. 1949 ADBut there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
16c. 1949 ADI'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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
17c. 1949 ADThat'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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
18c. 1949 ADThat's the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this person's hands, I'll be OK. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit - if a screw comes loose - he'll notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience he'll fix it, he'll tighten the screw again, put all the jumped threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
19c. 1949 ADHow can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
20c. 1949 ADWhat i'm trying to say is this. A certain kind of shittiness, a certain kind of stagnation, a certain kind of darkness, goes on propogating itself by its own power in its own self-contained cycle. And once it passes a certain point, no one can stop it - even if the person himself wants to stop it.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
21c. 1949 ADI was a vacant room. Inside, the music produces only a dry, hollow echo.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
22c. 1949 ADThe 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.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
23c. 1949 ADI think most readers would say the same. Most would choose Midori. And the protagonist, of course, chooses her in the end. But some part of him is always in the other world and he cannot abandon it. It’s a part of him, an essential part. All human beings have a sickness in their minds. That space is a part of them.Haruki Murakami / quote ↗
24c. 1949 ADBeing alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smellsHaruki Murakami / quote ↗
