It is truly astounding how stupid people can be.
No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.
His life seemed to lose its center of gravity – not that he had ever really had one, but up to that point, other people had placed certain demands and expectations upon him, and responding to them had kept him busy.
He understood he was different from other people. Though no one else noticed this, he thought his shadow on the ground was paler, lighter than that of other people. The only ones who really understood him were the cats.
These guys are a bunch of phonies. All they’ve got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they’re so proud of and sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they’re seniors, they cut their hair short and go trooping to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who’ve never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke.
Remember this well. That is as much as anyone can tell you; the rest you must learn for yourself. Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.
All the same, writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness.
Just as he appreciated Sara’s appearance, he also enjoyed the way she dressed.
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.
It was probably Chekhov who said that the novelist is not someone who answers questions but someone who asks them.
According to Chekhov, once a gun appears in a story, it has to be fired.
He was no Hitchcockian protagonist, embroiled in a conspiracy before he knew what was happening. He had embroiled himself, knowing full well that it contained an element of risk. The machine was already in motion, gaining too much forward momentum for him to stop it. Tengo himself was one of its gears – and an important one at that. He could hear the machine’s low groaning, and feel its implacable motion.
Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.
I have to somehow get connected to reality again, he thought, or else I won’t be me anymore. I’ll become a man who doesn’t exist.
I was happy being alone.
Heart and mind at the bottom of the sea.
I was at that age, that time of life when every sight, every feeling, every thought came back, like a boomerang, to me. And worse, I was in love.
I am a lumberjack... I can never manage to be a chic.
People think of all kinds of things at three in the morning. We all do. That’s why we each have to figure out our own way of fighting it off.
After she left, no one knows how wretched I felt, how deep the abyss. How could they? I can barely recall it myself. How much did I suffer? How much pain did I go through? I wish there was a machine that could accurately measure sadness, and display it in numbers that you could record, And it would be great if that machine could fit in the palm of your hand.