Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover. It’s like stepping back inside a room you have...

The sense of tragedy – according to Aristotle – comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into...

Me, I’ve seen 45 years, and I’ve only figured out one thing. That’s this: if a person would just make the effort, there’s something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace...

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

It’s not right for one friend to do all the giving and the other to do all the taking: that’s not read friendship.

Las cosas fluyen hacia donde tienen que fluir, y por más que te esfuerces e intentes hacerlo lo mejor posible, cuando llega el momento de herir a alguien lo hieres. La vida es así.

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

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...

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...

Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read,...

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....

What I want is for the two of us to meet somewhere by chance one day, like, passing on the street, or getting on the same bus.

Still, the time I spent with her was more precious than anything. She helped me forget the undertone of loneliness in my life. She expanded the outer edges of my world, helped me draw a...

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.

Todos nosotros somos seres imperfectos que vivimos en un mundo imperfecto.

He decided not to ask for details. Better to avoid exposing his ignorance even further.

Stop agreeing with everything I say! It’s not as if you’re going to solve everything by admitting your mistakes. Whether or not you admit then or not, mistakes are mistakes.””It’s true,” I said. It -was-...

I was dying to have a cat. But they wouldn’t let me. My mother hated them. Not once in my life have I managed to get something I really wanted. Not once. Can you believe...

here” little by little.

Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.

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...

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...

Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of...

The law presides over things of this world, finally. The world where shadow is shadow and light is light, yin is yin and yang is yang, I’m me and he’s him. ‘I am me and...

People leave strange little memories of themselves behind when they die.

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

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

I watched the moon alone, unable to share his cold beauty with anyone.

Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It is like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and...

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

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

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.

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...

Loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you.

continuamos viviendo cada uno a su manera, incluso ahora. Por profunda y fatal que sea la perdida, por importante que sea lo que nos han arrancado de las manos, aunque nos hayamos convertido en alguien...

Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile...

So the fact that I’m me and no one else is one of my greatest assets. Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent.

Once he gets to the fort the colonel turns to John Wayne and says, “I did see a few Indians on the way over here.” And John Wayne, with this really cool look on his...

The two of them on top of the freezing slide, wordlessly holding hands. Once again they were a ten-year-old boy and girl. A lonely boy, and a lonely girl. A classroom, just after school let...

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

Memory works in different ways for everybody. Different capacities, different directions, too. Sometimes memory helps you think, sometimes it impedes. Doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Probably means it’s no big deal.

Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems.

To him, they looked like shadows that his wife had left behind. Size 7 shadows of his wife hung there in long rows, layer upon layer, as if someone had gathered and hung up samples...

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.

When someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t. And when they’re running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them.

Suicides? Heart attacks? The papers didn’t seem interested. The world was full of ways to die, too many to cover. Newsworthy deaths had to be exceptional. Most people go unobserved.

But hell, you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got.

If only I could fallsound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She’d take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free...

Walking to the subway, Aomame kept thinking about the strangeness of the world. If, as the dowager had said, we were nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such...