"It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality."

"There. My ears are all dead. Now you try."Three times I repeated the movements she'd made. Slowly, carefully, but nothing left me with the impression that my ears had died. The wine was rapidly circulating through my system."I do believe that my ears aren't dying properly, " I said, disappointed.She shook her head. "That's okay. If your ears don't need to die, there's nothing wrong with them not dying."

"Every story has a time to be told."

"There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again."

"No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist."

"Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it."

"People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us know anything substantial about the other."

"Life doesn't require ideals. It requires standards of action."

"The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky."

"I need to learn not just to forget but to forgive."

"No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away."

"He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees."

"In the name of God, they stole her time and her freedom, putting shackles on her heart. They preached about God's kindness, but preached twice as much about his wrath and intolerance."

"I am living in hell from one day to the next. But there is nothing I can do to escape. I don't know where I would go if I did. I feel utterly powerless, and that feeling is my prision. I entered of my own free will, I locked the door, and I threw away the key."

"A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much."

"Everybody thinks I'm this delicate little girl."

"Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge, Aomame said."Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire's budget deficits. It has no moral significance."

"Nights without work I spent with whisky and books."

"The heart and flesh of an empty shell give birth to nothing more than the life of an empty shell."

"She lived frugally, but her meals were the only things on which she deliberately spent her money. She never compromised on the quality of her groceries, and drank only good-quality wines."

"That's the way it is with the mind. Nothing is ever equal. Like a river, as it flows, the course changes with the terrain."

"We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all."

"The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories."

"You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough."

"Since I'm a novelist I'm the opposite of you - I believe that what's most important is what cannot be measured. I'm not denying your way of thinking, but the greater part of people's lives consist of things that are unmeasurable, and trying to change all these to something measurable is realistically impossible."

"I think of you now mare than ever. It's raining today."

"My father always told me: 'Give somebody a hand and he'll take an arm."

"It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit."

"For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that's why I've put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I'm no great runner, by any means. I'm at an ordinary " or perhaps more like mediocre " level. But that's not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be."

"What alternative is there to the media's "Us versus "Them? The danger is that if it is used to prop up this "righteous position of "ours all we will see from now on are ever more exacting and minute analyses of the "dirty distortions in "their thinking. Without some flexibility in our definitions we'll remain forever stuck with the same old knee-jerk reactions, or worse, slide into complete apathy."

"That's how lonely and sad I was. Dying is not that hard. Lime the air being sucked slowly out of a room, the will to live was slowly seeping out of me. When you feel like rhat, dying doesn't seem like such a big deal."

"Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night."

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional."

"I dream, sometimes I think that's the only right thing to do."

"I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."

"Sheep hurt my father, and through my father, sheep have also hurt me."

"Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry-at someone else or at herself-which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears."

"Sitting on the floor, I'd replay the past in my head. Funny, that's all I did, day after day after day for half a year, and I never tired of it. What I'd been through seemed so vast, with so many facets. Vast, but real, very real, which was why the experience persisted in towering before me, like a monument lit up at night. And the thing was, it was a monument to me."

"I always felt as if I'd been handed a cardboard box crammed full of monkeys. I'd take the monkeys out of the box one at a time, carefully brush off the dust, give them a pat on the bottom, and send them scurrying off into the fields. I never knew where they went from there."

"Have your dream...What you need now more than anything is discipline. Cast off mere words. Words turn into stone. (from Thailand)"

"In dreams you don't need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don't exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don't hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. Reality, reality."

"With my eyes closed, I would touch a familiar book and draw its fragrance deep inside me. This was enough to make me happy."

"I could go on like this forever, but would I ever find a place that was meant for me? Like, for example, where? After lengthy considerations, the only place I could think of was the cockpit of a two-seater Kamikaze torpedo-plane. Of all the dumb ideas. In the first place, all the torpedo-planes were scrapped thirty years ago."

"Still, though, I can't be sure if the zoo as I recall it was really like that. How can I put it? I sometimes feel that it's too vivid, if you know what I mean. And when I start having thoughts like this, the more I think about it, the less I can tell how much of the vividness is real and how much of it my imagination has invented."

"I'm still not sure I made the right choice when I told my wife about the bakery attack.But then,it might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results, and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that,in fact, we never choose anything at all. Things happen. Or not."

"I want to write stories that are different from the ones I've written so far, Junpei thought: I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love."

"It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world's darkness had been boiled down to their ultimate density."

"Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time."

"It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films."

"We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something - with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish."