"When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it. That's what I think. It's just a form of sincerity."

"It's not as if our lives are simply divided into light and dark. There's a shadowy middle ground. Recognizing and understanding the shadows is what a healthy intelligence does."

"Sad hotels existed everywhere, to be sure, but the Dolphin was in a class of its own. The Dolphin Hotel was conceptually sorry. The Dolphin Hotel was tragic."

"They dig holes from time to time,' the Colonel explains. 'It is probably for them what chess is for me. It has no special meaning, does not transport them anywhere. All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to. Is there not something marvelous about this? We hurt no one and no one gets hurt. No victory, no defeat."

"But you knoe, she's right. Every single day, each time I see her face, see her, it's utterly precious."

"Samsa certainly had no idea what lay ahead. He was in the dark about everything: the future, of course, but the present and the past as well . What was right, and what was wrong? Just learning how to dress was a riddle."

"Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard."

"Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on the cat's chest and felt his heart beating. The pulse was faint and fast, but his heart, like mine, was ticking off the time allotted to his small body with all the restless earnestness of my own."

"There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night."

"Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can."

"Or maybe that's what it's all about: this religion's substance is its lack of substance. In McLuhanesque terms, the medium is the message. Some people might find that cool."McLuhanesque?"Hey, look, even I read a book now and then, Ayumi protested. "McLuhan was ahead of his time. He was so popular for a while that people tend not to take him seriously, but what he had to say was right."In other words, the package itself is the contents. Is that it?"Exactly. The characteristics of the package determine the nature of the contents, not the other way around."

"A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else."

"Ordinary imperfect people, always choose similarly imperfect people as friends."

"No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others."

"There's no sense forcing yourself if you don't feel like it. Tell you the truth, I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time."

"That's how stories happen - with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There's only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story."

"You know, Junpei, everything in the world has its reasons for doing what it does."

"It's true though: time moves in its own special way in the middle of the night," the bartender says, loudly striking a book match and lighting a cigarette. "You can't fight it."

"Memory is like fiction: or else it's fiction that's like memory."

"It seemed to me that this world has a serious shortage of both logic and kindness."

"People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile."

"I myself, as I'm writing, don't know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don't know the conclusion at all and I don't know what's going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don't know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there's no purpose to writing the story."

"I feel like I've swallowed a cloudy sky."

"Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I'm talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean."

"Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you."

"I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me."

"There are some things in this world that can be done over, and some that can't. And time passing is one thing that can't be undone. Come this far, and you can't go back."

"If I choose to write about sheep, it's just because I happened to write about sheep. There is no deep significance."

"Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously."

"Are there any capitalist cats?" Nakata asked."

"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."

"Even chance meetings are the result of karma. Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there's no such thing as coincidence."

"People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person dies."

"No matter how much suffering you went through, you never wanted to let go of those memories."

"Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?""I guess it depends on how you die."

"I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life."

"You lost all interest in this world. You were disappointed and discouraged, and lost interest in everything. So you abandoned your physical body. You went to a world apart and you're living a different kind of life there. In a world that's inside you."

"Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights become mysteriously distorted."

"Artists are those who can evade the verbose."

"Listen up - there's no war that will end all wars."

"Making up for lost time?""Yes," I say. "A lot of things were stolen from my childhood. Lots of important things. And now I have to get them back." "In order to keep on living.""

"There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel)"

"The sky grew darker, painted blue on blue, one stroke at a time, into deeper and deeper shades of night."

"I study the chessboard and concede defeat."You can gain yourself in five moves" says the Colonel. "Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until the final battle is over."

"In the end, like so many beautiful promises in our lives, that dinner date never came to be."

"If you think about it, an unfair society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit."

"I can bear any pain as long as it has meaning."

"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 even be worse the next time you open your eyes."

"That's the most important thing for a sickness like ours: a sense of trust. If I put myself in this person's hands, I'll be OK. If my condition starts to worsen even the slightest bit - if a screw comes loose - he'll notice straight away, and with tremendous care and patience he'll fix it, he'll tighten the screw again, put all the jumped threads back in place. If we have that sense of trust, our sickness stays away."

"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."