"But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drink, the very air I breathe, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."

"Living like an empty shell is not really living, no matter how many years it might go on."

"The whole universe is like some big FedEx box."

"Of course it hurt that we could never love each other in a physical way. We would have been far more happy if we had. But that was like the tides, the change of seasons--something immutable, an immovable destiny we could never alter. No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever. We were bound to reach a dead end. That was painfully clear."

"That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution."

"He was a far more voracious reader than me, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years. "That's the only kind of book I can trust," he said."It's not that I don't believe in contemporary literature," he added, "but I don't want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short."

"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."

"That's what we all do : endlessly take the long way around."

"People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art."

"At some point the future becomes reality. And then it quickly becomes the past."

"Girls who are on top of things must have three hundred ways of responding to tired thirty-five-year-old divorced men."

"I didn't read so much Japanese literature. Because my father was a teacher of Japanese literature, I just wanted to do something else."

"Every person has their own colour."

"I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place - death."

"I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run."

"I stayed in the town until earlyevening, and when the sun began to sink, my heart did too. This is your last chance to goback, I told myself. Once it gets completely dark, you might never be able to leave here. Iwent home on the same buses that had brought me there. I arrived before seven, and no onenoticed that I had run away."

"When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf."

"She and I were bound together at the border between life and death. It was like that for us from the start."

"But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words."

"A person's destiny is something you look back at afterwards, not something to be known in advance."

"Where there's guts, there's curiosity, and where there's curiosity, there's guts."

"The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart."

"Unable to sleep after the others had drowsed off, I crawled out of the tent and lay on the ground, looking at the sky. Now and then, a shooting star would trace a bright arc across the heavens. The longer I watched, though, the more nervous it made me. There were simply too many stars, and the sky was too vast and deep. A huge, overpowering foreign object, it surrounded me, enveloped me, and made me feel almost dizzy. Until that moment, I had always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I had never thought about such a thing at all. I had simply taken it for granted."

"When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly."

"A question wells up inside me, a question so big it blocks my throat and makes it hard to breathe. Somehow I swallow it back, finally choosing another. "Are memories such an important thing?""It depends," she replies, and closes her eyes. "In some cases, they're the most important thing there is."

"But hell, you've gotta work with what you've got."

"The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground."

"But metaphors help eliminate what separates you and me."

"I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling."

"Looking up at [the sky], I think about the October evening world, where 'people' must be going about their lives. Beneath that pale autumn light, they must be walking down streets, going to the store for things, preparing dinner, boarding trains for home. And they think--if they think at all--that these things are too obvious to think about, just as I used to do (or not do)."

"The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast."

"History cannot be erased or altered.Because that would mean killing yourself."

"Life's no piece of cake, mind you, but the recipe's my own to fool with."

"This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be along process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time."

"That's my dream. It's always the same. Always. Every little detail. And every time I have it, it's just as scary as the last. It's so real, I feel as if I've already died hundreds of times."

"All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says."

"Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world."

"April and May were painful, lonely months for me because I couldn't talk to you. I never knew that spring could be so painful and lonely. Better to have three Februaries than a spring like this."

"I'd like to have a good long talk with you once you've calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday."

"For a ten-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world."

"Mr. Nakata, this world is a terribly violent place. And nobody can escape the violence. Please keep that in mind. You can't be too cautious. The same holds true for cats and human beings."

"A poet might die at twenty-one, a revolutionary or a rock star at twenty four. But after that you assume everything's going to be all right. you've made it past Dead Man's Curve and you're out of the tunnel, cruising straight for your destination down a six lane highway whether you want it or not."

"Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle, running across someone to whom you can express your feeling so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been mistake to label this "love". It was more like total empathy."

"How can I put this? There's a king of gap between what I think is real and what's really real. I get this feeling like some kind of little something-or-other is there, somewhere inside me... like a burglar is in the house, hiding in a wardrobe... and it comes out every once in a while and messes up whatever order or logic I've established for myself. The way a magnet can make a machine go crazy."

"I had thought about it so often - too often, to the point where it had distorted my sense of time."

"Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end."

"The conclusion of things is the good. The good is, in other words, the conclusion at which all things arrive. Let's leave doubt for tomorrow," Komatsu said. "That is the point."

"Women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie. This was Dr. Tokai's personal opinion. It depends on the person, he said about the kind of lies they tell, what situation they tell them in, and how the lies are told. But at a certain point in their lives, all women tell lies, and they lie about important things. They lie about unimportant things, too, but they also don't hesitate to lie about the most important things. And when they do, most women's expressions and voices don't change at all, since it's not them lysing, but this independent organ they're equipped with that's acting on its own. That's why - except for a few special cases - they can still have a clear conscience and never lose sleep over anything they say."

"Maybe you didn't want to get married, or get tied down?'Tsukuru shook his head. 'No, I don't think that was it. I'm the sort of person who craves stability."

"We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy."