The world seemed to have a better sense of how you wanted things not to go.
Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside.
Something will work out tomorrow, I thought. And if not, then tomorrow I’ll do some thinking. Ob – la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.
What I liked most about Miu was that she didn’t try to hide her age. According to Sumire, she must be thirty-eight or thirty-nine. And indeed she looked that age. With her slim, tight figure, a little makeup and she’d easily pass for late twenties. But she didn’t make the effort. Miu let age naturally rise to the surface, accepted it for what it was, and made her peace with it. M.
In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul.
I knew I’d be all right, I’d be safe with you there.
That’s why I go all out in whatever I do. I want to stretch myself as far as I can, to see what I’m capable of. I have no time to be bored. That’s the best way I know of keeping fear and emptiness at arm’s length.
She named a coffee shop not far from the Shinjuku Gyoen-mae Station. The name brought back memories.
For a moment an agreeable aftertaste remained, but after a few seconds this disappeared, like morning dew on a summer leaf.
If you don’t understand something, then stick with it until you do.
Unimpeded by other schemes, this hint of things to come takes time to expand in the new morning light, and we attempt to watch it unobtrusively, with deep concentration. The night has begun to open up at last. There will be time until the next darkness arrives.
Maybe when people take their eyes off them, inanimate objects become even more inanimate.
Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues. All the same, were we to speak only the truth all year round, then the truth might lose its value.
The two of us are linked together by the heavy bonds of silence that pass through the wall separating our two worlds.
And you know what you once told me, about how people’s eyes have something honest about them when they’re watching a fire.
It was a senseless, evil thing to do. Still, evil like that is everywhere in this world, mountains of it. I can’t understand it, you can’t understand it. But it’s there, no question. You could say we’re surrounded by it.
Aomame thought about the jiyugaoka apartment she had just vacated. It was in an old building, not terribly clean, with the occasional cockroach, and the walls were thin – not exactly the kind of place to which one because attached. Now, though, she missed it. In this brand-new, spotless condo, she felt like an anonymous person, stripped of memory and individuality.
She smiles and looks at us, he told himself, but she doesn’t see anything. She’s looking at us, but she’s seeing something else.
He never had a lot to say, but he had his definite tastes and opinions.