With luck, it might even snow for us.

The most important thing we ever learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

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...

It’s a question of attitude. If you really work at something you can do it up to a point. If you really work at being happy you can do it up to a point. But...

Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird,” said May Kasahara. “Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs...

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I’m told. It’s in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can’t trust anything they haven’t seen with their own eyes or touched with...

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.

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.

I think serious readers of books are 5% of the population. If there are good TV shows or a World Cup or anything, that 5% will keep on reading books very seriously, enthusiastically. And if...

Not just beautiful, though–the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they’re watching me.

To conserve energy, her little planet stopped spinning.

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why?...

I can hardly breathe, and my whole body wants to shrink into a corner. It’s so much easier to just believe in reincarnation. You might be reborn as something awful, but at least you can...

When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person that walked in. That’s what the storm is all about.

it’s a fine moon’, she repeated

Silence. How long it lasted, I couldn’t tell. It might have been five seconds, it might have been a minute. Time wasn’t fixed. It wavered, stretched, shrank. Or was it me that wavered, stretched, and...

…most people in the world don’t really use their brains to think. And people who don’t think are the ones who don’t listen to others.

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...

For me- and for everybody else, probably- this is my first experience growing old, and the emotions I’m having, too, are all first-time feelings. If it were something I’d experienced before, then I’d be able...

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,...

I learned there were lots of realities in the world.

Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us – is rewritten...

The ocean was one of the greatest things he had ever seen in his life—bigger and deeper than anything he had imagined. It changed its color and shape and expression according to time and place...

She gave me this look – she might have been watching from a lifeboat as the ship went down. Or maybe it was the other way around.

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful...

People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It’s too easy not...

In his or her own way, everyone I saw before me looked happy. Whether they were really happy or just looked it, I couldn’t tell. But they did look happy on this pleasant early afternoon...

You know what I should do?” Hoshino asked excited. “Of course,” the cat said. “What’d I tell you? Cats know everything. Not like dogs.

There are symbolic dreams– dreams that symbolize some reality. Then there are symbolic realities — realities that symbolize a dream. Symbols are what you might call the honorary town councillors of the worm universe. In...

I’m free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can’t really understand what it means. All I know is I’m totally alone. All alone...

People lose fifty million skin cells every day. The cells get scraped off and turn into invisible dust, and disappear into the air. Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world...

Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to...

I mean, all I do here is do the work that my bosses tell me to do the way they tell me to do it. I don’t have to think at all. It’s like I...

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...

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

It might be a little silly for someone getting to be my age to put this into words, but I just want to make sure I get the facts down clearly : I’m the kind...

My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless–a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there,...

The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about. I myself can only wish that my stories were, indeed, nothing but...

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...

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

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

We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m racing with my own shadow

In any case, suffice it to say I enjoyed hearing about faraway places. I had stocked up a whole store of these places, like a bear getting ready for hibernation. I’d close my eyes, and...

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.

I’ve been lonely for so long. And I’ve been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn’t have had to take all these detours to...

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.

Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.

Wherever there’s hope there’s a trial.

Your heart is like a great river after a long spell of rain, spilling over its banks. All signposts that once stood on the ground are gone, inundated and carried away by that rush of...