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. No car, no car stereo, no silver bracelets, no shuffling, no dark blue tweed suits.
My life might have been totally different if I hadn’t been born with this name. If I had had an ordinary name like Sato or Tanaka or Suzuki, I could have lived a slightly more relaxed life or looked at people with somewhat more forgiving eyes. Perhaps.
Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it might go on.
I wasn’t young anymore, and something – like a flame burning inside me – was steadily fading away. The feeling of that flame warming me from within was receding ever further.
The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. I trudged along through each day in its turn, rarely looking up, eyes locked on the never-ending swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.
I felt as if I had become part of a badly written novel, that someone was taking me to task for being utterly unreal. And perhaps it was true.
He considered using the time to think, but he couldn’t think of anything to think about.
It is the inherent right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language in every way they can imagine – without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.
Maybe a person really has to die to understand what it’s like.
Whatever,” said Nagasawa. “But Watanabe’s practically the same as me. He may be a nice guy, but deep down in his heart he’s incapable of loving anybody. There’s always some part of him somewhere that’s wide awake and detached. He just has that hunger that won’t go away. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.
Kalau kita membaca buku yang sama dengan yang dibaca orang lain, kita cuma bisa berpikir seperti orang lain. Watanabe, kamu tahu? Di asrama ini, orang yang bisa dianggap manusia itu cuma aku dan kamu. Yang lainnya, semua kertas sampah belaka.
I was a vacant room. Inside, the music produces only a dry, hollow echo.
You’re the type of guy who takes longer than other people to be convinced of anything. But long term, I think time is on your side.
It is beyond comprehension who the waves are roaring for, who listens to them at nights here, what they want, and finally, who they would roar for when I was gone.
If the need arose, she knew, she would never hesitate to apply her sophisticated techniques in actual combat. ‘If there’s anyone crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world – close up. I’m going to let him sing the kingdom come with his own eyes. I’m going to send him straight to the Southern Hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.
Girls who are on top of things must have three hundred ways of responding to tired thirty-five-year-old divorced men.
You have to patiently learn to live together with your shadow. And carefully observe the darkness that resides within you. Sometimes in a dark tunnel you have to confront your own dark side.
But In dreams begin responsibilities, right?” Oshima nods. “Yeats.
Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness, a story. – Tolstoy.
It all seemed like a short dream. But I knew very well that it wasn’t. If this was a dream, then the world I’m living in itself must all be a dream.