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.
May the life you lead be a good one, a life free of regrets.
You could go running all around here in the middle of the night and you’d never fall into the well. And as long as I stick with you, I won’t fall in, either.
But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls ‘hollow men’. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to.
In this huge world there are some beautiful, happy families where parents and children maintain a close, warm relationship – a situation about as frequent as hat tricks in soccer. I have no confidence at all that I could be one of these rare happy parents, and can’t see Tokai doing it either.
The two are obviously accustomed to working together. Their movements are smooth and economical.
Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? I mean, really, really, really honest? Sometimes I get sooo scared! I’ll wake up in the middle of the night all alone, hundreds of miles away from anybody, and it’s pitch dark, and I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future, and I get so scared I want to scream. Does that happen to you, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? When it happens, I try to remind myself that I am connected to others – other things and other people.
Silence wove itself into the spaces of everything around us.
Just be careful of water.
No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortcake. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out and buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortcake out to me. And I say I don’t want it anymore and throw it out the window. That’s what I’m looking for.
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream.
This was the second stage in my life, a step in my personal evolution – abandoning the idea of being different, and settling for normal... Gradually I drew nearer to the world, and the world drew nearer to me.
Oh boy,” I said with a sigh, drinking down the last of my beer. “It must be a wonderful thing to be so sure that you love somebody.
Tautologies are instantaneous, everything is revealed at once. Eternity can actually be experienced. Once you set up a closed circuit, you just keep spinnin’ ’round and ’round in there. That’s the nature of tautologies. No interruptions like with dreams. It’s like the encyclopedia wand.
If I learned anything in nursing school, it’s that bright words make the eardrums vibrate brightly. They have their own bright sound. So even if the patient doesn’t understand what you’re saying, his eardrums will physically vibrate on that bright wavelength. We’re taught to always talk to the patient in a big, bright voice whether he can hear you or not. It definitely helps, whatever the logic involved.
What did you expect? Tsukuru asked himself. A basically empty vessel has become empty once again. Who can you complain to about that? People come to him, discover how empty he is, and leave. What’s left is an empty, perhaps even emptier, Tsukuru Tazaki, all alone. Isn’t that all there is to it?
New York in November really does have a special charm to it. The air is clear and crisp, and the leaves on the trees in Central Park are just beginning to turn golden. The sky is so clear you can see forever, and the skyscrapers lavishly reflect the sun’s rays. You feel you can keep on walking one block after another without end. Expensive cashmere coats fill the windows at Bergdorf Goodman, and the streets are filled with the delicious smell of roasted pretzels.
Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.
There must have been a reason, but it probably wasn’t a very good one if I can’t even remember what it was.
No matter what we said, people would believe what they wanted to believe.