Although I was lonely, I was not unhappy. I was able to cling to myself. At least now I had a self to cling to.
Expect nothing, get nothing.
For him, the game is not to defeat the opponent, but to challenge his own abilities.
I was determined that my free time was going to be mine.
We were all getting old. That much was as plain as the falling rain.
It almost hurt to look at that far-off sky.
The mask possesses equal levels of sorcery and functionality. It has been both handed down from ancient times with darkness and sent back from the future with light.
Memory is a funny thing. When I was in the scene I hardly paid it any attention. I never stopped to think of it as something that would make a lasting impression.
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.
Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy... There are channels through which reality can become unreal, or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.
He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.
Yeah. The more languages you know the better. And I’ve got a knack for them. I taught myself French and it’s practically perfect. Languages are like games. You learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. Like women.
Special emotions that arise only in a dark corner unknown to other people, where the real and the unreal secretly mingle.
The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius. Somebody’s got to keep watch, take care of business.
The bottle and the cap don’t fit: is the problem with the bottle or the cap?
No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness.
With jealousy, a parasite takes root in your heart. It becomes a cancer that eats away at your soul.
Perhaps nothing can be certain in this world,” I said. “But at least we can believe in something.
Works that have a certain imperfection to them have an appeal for that very reason – or at least they appeal to certain types of people. Just like you’re attracted to Soseki’s The Miner. There’s something in it that draws you in, more than more fully realized novels like Kokoro or Sanshiro. You discover something about that work that tugs at your heart – or maybe we should say the work discovers you. Schubert’s Sonata in D Major is sort of the same thing.
I was living someone else’s life, not my own. How much of this person I called myself was really me? And how much was not? These hands clutching the steering wheel – what percentage of them could I really call my own? The scenery outside – how much of it was real? The more I thought about it, the less I seemed to understand.