Relax your body, and the rest of you will lighten up.
My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life.
A smile like a small wisp of smoke drifting quietly skyward on a windless day.
When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that’s the real world.
Let her be spared from anguished dreams, I found myself hoping.
Muscles are hard to get and easy to lose. Fat is easy to get and hard to lose.
It was the first time he had seen her smile. It was the faintest of smiles, yet he felt the tides start to shift all over the world. He knew it was happening.
Nothing abstruse or ambivalent about it, not a speck of the metaphoric or the symbolic.
That’s another one of our rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes.
The end of the race is just a temporary marker without much significance. It’s the same with our lives. Just because there’s an end doesn’t mean existence has meaning. An end point is simply set up as a temporary marker, or perhaps as an indirect metaphor for the fleeting nature of existence.
Irony deepens a person, helps them mature. It is the entrance to salvation on a higher plane, to a place where you can find a more universal kind of hope.
He couldn’t change my mind about him, though. I went on loving him just the same, and I could never be interested in anyone else.
Only by learning the truth – whatever that truth might be – could people be given the right kind of power.
Am I happy? All I can say is I guess so. That’s pretty much the way it is with dreams.
The sky was a fresh-swept blue, with only a trace of white cloud clinging to the dome of heaven like a thin streak of test paint.
Six years during which time I’d laid three cats to rest. Burned how many aspirations, bundled up how much suffering in thick sweaters, and buried them in the ground. All in this fathomlessly huge city Tokyo.
Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music.
I have no physical symptoms, but psychologically there’s this burden. I’ve got to get rid of it somehow. Of course, when I first went back to work I was scared the same thing might happen again. It takes positive thinking to overcome fear, otherwise you’ll carry around this victim mentality forever.
She picked up the ballpoint pen lying on the table, and played with it for a few seconds, but then she looked at the clock again. It had done its job: in the five minutes since her last look, it had advanced five minutes’ worth.
Aomame’s family – as far as Ushikawa could see it, that is – were narrow-minded in their thinking, narrow-minded in the way they lived. They were people who had no doubt whatsoever that the more narrow-minded they became, the closer they got to heaven.