Durum semolina, golden wheat wafting in Italian fields. Can you imagine how astonished the Italians would be if they knew that what they were exporting in 1971 was really loneliness

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It’s a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the...

Ce sper eu e sa fac de ras lumea literara. Sa rad pe cat pot de netrebnicii astia lingusitori, adunati ca intr-un musuroi, care se pupa-n fund unul pe altul si isi ling ranile in timp ce, de fapt, isi pun bete roate reciproc.

I don’t think it’s a question of liking or disliking it,” Tengo said…”It was the one thing he was best at.” “Hmm. I see,” Kumi said. She pondered this. “But that might very well be the best way to live your life.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon,...

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.

Anyhow, even though I might go out on a date with a boy, emotionally I just wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I’d be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string. I’d be thinking about one unrelated thing after another. I don’t know,...

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...

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

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

Anyhow, I took every stitch of clothing off and got out of bed. And I got down on my knees on the floor in the white moonlight. The heat was off and the room must have been cold, but I didn’t feel cold. There was some kind of special something in the moonlight and it...

Don’t you get tired of always playing it cool?”The moon did not answer.

As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. 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.

The fresh smell of coffee soon wafted through the apartment, the smell that separates night from day.

Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.

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

A cell is just a room if you don’t lock the door.

Even if things were the same, people’s perception of them might have been very different back then. The darkness of night was probably deeper then, so the moon must have been that much bigger and brighter.

Are there any capitalist cats?” Nakata asked

There’s not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn’t depend in some way on advertising. It’d be like an aquarium without water. Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for.

I’m all alone, but I’m not lonely.

All I know is I’m totallyalone. All alone i n an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who’s lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free? I don’t know, and I give up thinking about it.

At the same time that ‘I’ am the content of a relation, ‘I’ am also that which does the relating.

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- true.

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...

Loving another person is a wonderful thing, and if that love is sincere, no one ends up tossed into a labyrinth. You have to have more faith in yourself.

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as...

All’s well that ends well.”Assuming there’s an end somewhere,’ Aomame said.Tamaru formed some short creases near his mouth that were faintly reminiscent of a smile. ‘There has to be an end somewhere. It’s just that nothing’s labeled “This is the end.” Is the top rung of a ladder labeled “This is the last rung. Please...

Sorel’s basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself into a dungeon. Walled in, with nowhere to go...

I feel very strongly that all Japanese at that time had the idea drilled into them of 1999 being the end of the world. Aum renunciates have already accepted, inside themselves, the end of the world, because when they become a renunciate, they discard themselves totally, thereby abandoning the world. In other words, Aum is...

Were the stars out when I left the house last evening? All I could remember was the couple in the Skyline listening to Duran Duran. Stars? Who remembers stars? Come to think of it, had I even looked up at the sky recently? Had the stars been wiped out of the sky three months ago,...

If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world — close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I’m going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him...

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 face, replies, ‘Don’t worry. If you were able to spot some Indians, that means there weren’t any there.’ I don’t...

I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they’re a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there’s this thick, high wall. At...

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

A person’s last moments are an important thing. You can’t choose how you’re born but you can choose how you die.

I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I’m alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.

They were each like a mirror for the other, reflecting the changes in themselves.

Math is like water. It has a lot of difficult theories, of course, but its basic logic is very simple. Just as water flows from high to low over the shortest possible distance, figures can only flow in one direction. You just have to keep your eye on them for the route to reveal itself....

Maybe it’s been like that for you till now. But you’re not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It’s simple. It’s your right… right?

There are symbolic dreams-dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities-realities that symbolize a dream

Anyway, I’m in bed with her, with her bracelets. Her face is a blank, so I darken the lights. Off go her silky undergarments. The bracelets are all she has on. They glint slightly, a pleasant muffled clinking on the sheets. I have a hard-on.Which, halfway down the ladder, is what I noticed. Just great....

They say a name expresses the thing it stands for, but I wonder if it isn’t the other way around—the thing gets more and more like its name.

Okay, let’s put it this way. I would like to sleep with you. But it’s alright if I don’t sleep with you. What I’m saying is I’d like to be as fair as possible. I don’t want to force anything on anybody, any more than I’d want anything forced on me. It’s enough that I...

It is cognition that is the fantasy…. Everything I tell you now is mere words. Arrange them and rearrange them as I might, I will never be able to explain to you the form of Will… My explanation would only show the correlation between myself and that Will by means of a correlation on the...

When I look back at myself at age twenty, what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained...

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

The very thought of such people’s intolerant worldview, their inflated sense of self superiority, and their callous imposition of their own beliefs on others was enough to fill her with rage.

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...