How many times in her thirty years had she heard the same remarks, the same feeble jokes about her name?

I don’t think most people would like my personality. There might be a few — very few, I would imagine- who are impressed by it, but rarely would anyone like it.

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

Are you asking because you really want an answer?

For a long time, she held a special place in my heart. I kept this special place just for her, like a “Reserved” sign on a quiet corner table in a restaurant. Despite the fact...

Holding this soft, small living creature in my lap this way, though, and seeing how it slept with complete trust in me, I felt a warm rush in my chest. I put my hand on...

My peak? Would I even have one? I hardly had had anything you could call a life. A few ripples. some rises and falls. But that’s it. Almost nothing. Nothing born of nothing. I’d loved...

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

I dream. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do.

In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,'” she repeats, making sure of it. If she had paper and pencil, it wouldn’t surprise me if she wrote it down. “So what does that really mean? In...

Lo que quiero decir es que el dolor se vuelve crónico. Engullido por la vida diaria, uno deja de saber cuáles son las heridas. Pero están ahí. Así son las heridas: no se pueden coger...

But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing?Who...

You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates throughout the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at...

Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiosity usually evaporates. Gust have to go for the long haul. Curiosity’s like a fun friend you can’t really trust....

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...

That’s evolution. Evolution’s always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution

It seems to me that very sad things always contain an element of the comical

He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many things he didn’t know. Yet had he been...

He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it...

El amor que se profesaban era tan verdadero que no había ninguna necesidad de ponerlo a prueba. El destino los había unido con un lazo tan fuerte que solo es posible encontrar uno igual entre...

When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the...

His biases played a large role here, but for Komatsu bias was an important element of truth.

I would never see her again, except in memory. She was here, and now she’s gone. There is no middle ground. Probably is a word that you may find south of the border. But never,...

Quello che voglio dire è che una condizione del genere dopo un po’ diventa cronica. La ferita è riassorbita nella quotidianità e non ci si ricorda più dov’è. Ma rimane. Non è una cosa che...

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...

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little...

This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking...

The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I’ve ever met.””You’ve met God?””Certainly. I telephone Him every night.

Kitąsyk užsimerkęs paliesdavau kokią pažįstamą knygą ir giliai į plaučius įtraukdavau jos kvapą. Vien šito pakakdavo, kad pasijausčiau laimingas.

It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine.

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

Whenever I look at the ocean, I always want to talk to people, but when I’m talking to people, I always want to look at the ocean.

Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they’re able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense...

No two human beings are alike; it’s a question of identity. And what is identity? The cognitive system arisin’ from the aggregate memories of that individual’s past experiences. The layman’s word for this is the...

He stopped complaining, but now I was annoyed. I went to the roof and drank alone.

It’s autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It’s exhausting to get into those crowds. And the...

It was a small room with dim light coming in the window, reminiscent of old Polish films.

El odio es una sombra negra y alargada. En muchos casos, ni siquiera quien lo siente sabe de dónde le viene. Es un arma de doble filo. Al mismo tiempo que herimos al contrincante nos...

I go out on the porch and gaze up at the stars twinkling above, the random scattering of millions of stars. Even in a planetarium you wouldn’t find as many. Some of them really look...

It’s not so easy for people to end their own lives. It’s not like in the movies. There, they do it like nothing, no pain, and it’s all over, they’re dead. The reality is not...

I study the chessboard and concede defeat.”You can gain yourself in five moves” says the Colonel. “Worth fighting to the end. In five moves your opponent can err. No war is won or lost until...

From the girl who sat before me now…surged a fresh and physical life force. She was like a small animal that has popped into the world with the coming of spring. Her eyes moved like...

Image is everything. You don’t spare any expense to create the right image. And word of mouth is critical. Once you get a good reputation, momentum will carry you.

Nobody chooses to evolve. It’s like floods and avalanches and earthquakes. You never know what’s happening until they hit, then it’s too late.

Su vida parecía haber perdido el rumbo. Aunque nunca se había fijado realmente un objetivo, hasta entonces la gente había creado ciertas expectativas a su alrededor. Respondiendo a esas expectativas, su vida había transcurrido con...

I’ve had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no....

here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never...

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

Latter-day capitalism. 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...

If she did experience sex–or something close to it–in high school, I’m sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.