"Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route."

"Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and youcatch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In aninstant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. Butif you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, justbarely for a few moments."

"Wasn't much of a life anyway. Wasn't much of a brain.""But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life?""Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag."

"No, I don't want your money. The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don't like to owe anybody anything, so I keep to myself as much on the lending side as I can."

"Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum-- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided."

"Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start- the way a map that shows too much can sometimes be useless."

"That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing."

"If you have to choose between something that has form and something that doesn't, go for the one without form. That's my rule."

"The sky both exists and doesn't exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn't. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in."

"I feel as if the world is listening for my next thought. But I can't think of anything. Sorry, but I just can't think of anything."

"I never once thought I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as I left college, though, they sent me my draft notice, stuck me in officers training, and I ended up on the continent for twelve years. My life went by like a dream."

"You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally."

"We keep moving. And as we do, the things around us, well, they disappear."

"The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves."

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

"When you're always scheming about ways to make money, it's like a part of you is lost."

"Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound."

"Everybody has to start somewhere. You have your whole future ahead of you. Perfection doesn't happen right away."

"From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone."

"It was as if-this is something I thought of only later, of course-she was gently peeling bcd one layer after another hat covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling."

"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."

"Violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood."

"IT's not death. It's eternal life. And you get't'be yourself. Compared to that, this world isn't but a momentary fantasy. Please don't forget that."

"There is an instinctive withdrawal for the sake of preservation, a closure that assumes the order of completion. Winter is a season unto itself."

"And while he sat there on the end of the jetty, he'd let the sound of the waves fill his ears, watch the clouds and schools of tiny sweetfish, take pebbles he'd pocketed on the way and throw them out into the deep. Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in."

"There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose--a gleaming, round saucer--over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul--or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon."

"Nobody chooses to evolve. It's like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what's happening until they hit, then it's too late."

"A question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime."

"Necessity is an independent concept. It has a different structure from logic, morals, or meaning. Its function lies entirely in the role it plays. What doesn't play a role shouldn't exist. What necessity requires does need to exist. That's what you call dramaturgy."

"Every person should decide for himself how happy, or unhappy, our society might be."

"Energies expended on sideshows, never on the main event. Where the hell was the main event? Was there a main event?"

"I don't know what it means to live."

"Sometimes I feel so- I don't know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space with no idea where I'm going'Like a little lost Sputnik?'I guess so."

"There are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life,' Eri finally said. 'And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn't anticipated arises instead. It's not that easy to get free of them. That's true for you - and for me, too."

"What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities."

"The fact remains that a certain combination of fragrances can captivate the opposite sex like the scent of an animal in heat. One kind of fragrance might attract fifty out of a hundred people. And another scent will attract the other fifty. But there also are scents that only one or two people will find wildly exciting. And I have the ability, from far away, to sniff out those special scents. When I do, I want to go up to the girl who radiates this aura and say, Hey, I picked it up, you know. No one else gets it, but I do."

"Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant."

"There was a time when my soul was wandering through the deepest darkness."

"Once upon a time, you dragged a part of me into the world of the dead, and now Naoko has dragged another pat of me into that world."

"Listen to this, Nimit. Follow Coleman Hawkins' improvised lines very carefully. He is using them to tell us something. Pay very close attention. He is telling us the story of the free spirit that is doing everything it can to escape from within him. That same kind of spirit is inside me, inside you. There--you can hear it, I'm sure: the hot breath, the shivering heart. (Thailand)"

"Lies are terrible things. One could say that the greatest sins afflicting modern society are the proliferation of lies and silence. We lie through our teeth, then swallow our tongues. All the same, were we to speak only the truth all year round, then the truth might lose its value."

"Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in."

"It is not that the meaning cannot be explained. But there are certain meanings that are lost forever the moment they are explained in words."

"I wasn't in love with her. And she didn't love me. For me the question of love was irrelevant. What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial. I had no idea what that was. But I wanted to thrust my hand right inside her body and touch it, whatever it was."

"Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When they're treated like that, children start to crawl inside a shell and keep everything inside. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them to open up again. Kids' hearts are malleable, but once they gel it's hard to get them back the way they were."

"Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting."

"And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about."

"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"

"When you prick a person with a needle, red blood comes out- that's the real world."

"I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and now, wouldn't exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The present world wouldn't exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist-just as this world would no longer exist for him."