I often dream about the Dolphin Hotel.
It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition.
In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.
I was thirty-seven then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to the Hamburg airport.
In terms of evolutionary history, it was only yesterday that men learned to walk around on two legs and get in trouble thinking complicated thoughts. So don’t worry, you’ll burn out.
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work.
Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.
Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside.
It was spring break, so the theater was always packed with high schools students. It was an animal house. I wanted to burn the place down.
This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.
There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals. Types of death you can’t smell.
What I saw wasn’t a ghost. It was simply – myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think?
I don’t really know if it’s the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more ocean fronts filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?
I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away.
Somewhere in his body – perhaps in the marrow of his bones – he would continue to feel her absence.
He was silent for thirty seconds, maybe a minute. I uncrossed my legs under the table and wondered if this was the right moment to leave. It was as if my whole life revolved around trying to judge the right point in a conversation to say goodbye.
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.
Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum – a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes, and I’m watching over it for no one but myself.
When the fire goes out, you’ll start feeling the cold. You’ll wake up whether you want to or not.
Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.