This “IF” is way too big.
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.
If we own things, we’re terrified we’ll lose them; if we’ve got nothing we worry it’ll be that way forever.
We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues.
All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything.
It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.
Only by taking his own life was my uncle able to recover his humanity.
Back within those eyes there was a deep world, a world beyond time.
In the end we all die anyway.
If people lived forever – if they never got any older – if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy – do you think they’d bother to think hard about things the way we’re doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less – philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world.
Where there’s guts, there’s curiosity, and where there’s curiosity, there’s guts.
The task of writing consists primarily in recognizing the distance between oneself and the things around one. It is not sensitivity one needs, but a yardstick.
I think most people live in a fiction. I’m no exception. Think of it in terms of a car’s transmission. It’s like a transmission that stands between you and the harsh realities of life. You take the raw power from outside and use gears to adjust it so everything’s all nicely in sync. That’s how you keep your fragile body intact. Does this make any sense?
The narrower a man’s intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in this country. I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here. And that is not to imagine anything.
The thought caused me a good deal of grief. What a terrible thing it is to wound someone you really care for – and to do it so unconsciously.
I hear things. Not sounds, but thick slabs of silence being dragged through the dark.
Good style, clear argument, but you’re not saying anything.
I want to push myself to my limits, and if things don’t work out, then I can give up. But I will do everything I can until the bitter end.
He was going to die soon, you knew when you saw those eyes. There was no sign of life in his flesh, just the barest traces of what had once been a life. His body was like a dilapidated old house from which all furniture and fixtures have been removed and which awaited now only its final demolition. Around the dry lips sprouted clumps of whiskers like so many weeds. So, I thought, even after so much of his life force had been lost, a man’s beard continued to grow.
Libraries have certainly come a long way. The days of card pockets inside the backsleeves of books seemed like a faded dream. As a kid, I used to love all those withdrawal date stamps.