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...

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...

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...

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...

I don’t think it’s right that I’m part of the problem. I can’t be part of the solution if I’m part of the problem

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...

I’m tired of living unable to love anyone. I don’t have a single friend – not one. And, worst of all, I can’t even love myself. Why is that? Why can’t I love myself? It’s...

My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.

No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the...

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.

No se debe oponer resistencia a la corriente: hay que ir hacia arriba cuando hay que ir hacia arriba, y hacia abajo cuando hay que ir hacia abajo. Cuando debas ir hacia arriba, busca la...

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

Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.

Aren’t you afraid of dying?Not really. I’ve watched lots of good-for-nothing, worthless people die, and if people like that can do it, then I should be able to handle it.

What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal...

Most of the psychological differences between men and women seem to come from differences in their reproductive system

Nights without work I spent with whisky and books.

If I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re...

My words did not seem to reach her. Or, if they did, she was unable to grasp their meaning.

Like it or not, it’s the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdivided, made sophisticated. Within good, there’s fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within...

People leave traces of themselves where they feel most comfortable, most worthwhile.

…somewhere, on some subterranean level, her darkness and his may have connected.

If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well...

Tengo’s lectures took on uncommon warmth, and the students found themselves swept up in his eloquence. He taught them how to practically and effectively solve mathematical problems while simultaneously presenting a spectacular display of the...

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

I was feeling lonely without her, but the fact that I could feel lonely at all was consolation. Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the...

I could feel a small polished stone sinking through the darkest waters of my heart. All those deep convoluted channels and passageways, and yet she managed to toss her pebble right down to the bottom...

I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.

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...

When you are used to the kind of life -of never getting anything you want- you stop knowing what it is you want.

I find myself thinking about my ongoing existence as a human being and the path that lies ahead of me. Though of course these thoughts lead to but one place – death.

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...

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...