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.

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...

E se a minha vida não fôr mais do que um processo de materialização, através do qual eu dou forma a imagens latentes que vivem adormecidas em mim?

Open your eyes, train your ears, use your head. If a mind you have, then use it while you can.

I’d like to have a good long talk with you once you’ve calmed down. Please call me soon. Happy Birthday.

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...

I don’t know, it’s stupid being 20,” she said. “I’m just not ready. It feels weird. Like somebody’s pushing me from behind.

What happens when people open their hearts?””They get better.

They had stolen my memories from me! Nobody had that right. Nobody! My memories belonged to me. Stealing memories was stealing time. I got so mad, I lost all fear. I didn’t care what happened....

It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep...

If I do tell you the story, the two of us will always share it. And I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. if I lift open the lid now, you’ll be...

As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students’ heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world’s riddles...

I’d always thought that the earth on which I stood was a solid object that would last forever. Or rather, I’d never thought about such a thing at all. I’d simply taken it for granted.

Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs. Lovers were whispering to each other, businessmen were poring over spread sheets,...

Quiero llegar hasta donde pueda empleando todas mis fuerzas. Tomando lo que quiero, dejando lo que no quiero. Así es como vivo. Si meto la pata, me detengo y lo reconsidero. Si uno le da...

In the novelist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature,...

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet...

Even chance meetings are the result of karma… Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.

Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance.

If you’re young and talented, it’s like you have wings.

People who’s freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don’t want to live like that.

Tendencies. Yougottendencies. Soevenifyoudideverythingoveragain, yourwholelife, yougottendenciestodojustwhatyoudid, alloveragain. -The Sheep Man.