But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.

Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men —even children. You...

Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they’d choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up...

People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur....

This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we...

I wonder why people you have to meet have to be such liars. They lie as if their lives depended on it.

That’s when he hit her, when he saw how scared she was. He couldn’t bear it that she was frightened and asking for help. Asking for help is wrong. Because there isn’t any such thing...

After listening to a lot of these stories, I began to think that American loneliness is a completely different creature from anything we experience in this country, and it made me glad I was born...

When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self,...

Memories are’t like words; they’re soft and gooey. Covered with a sticky slime, like a penis after sex, or your vagina when you menstruate, and shaped like tadpoles or tiny watersnakes

These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they’d all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their...

To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull...

That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of...

Yeah, he’d said, maybe it’s just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don’t hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it’s not just because my...

Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.

Who hasn’t wanted to die at one time or another?

It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling...

No forgiveness for lies.

You don’t know what cold is until you’ve experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body.

I remembered reading in a hard-boiled detective novel that if you drink in the same place two nights in a row, the bartender and waiters will remember your face.

And sometimes ignorance is even harder to deal with than deliberate evil.

When you’re in an extreme situation you tend to avoid facing it by getting caught up in little details. Like a guy who’s decided to commit suicide and boards a train only to become obsessed...

But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can’t help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn’t a...

Every time he studied this instrument, with its slender, gleaming steel rod that tapered down to such needle-like sharpness, he wondered why it was necessary to have things like this in the world. If it...

What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.

If everyone could feel as I felt at that moment, dressed in my preppy sweater and McGregor coat and about to set out on a little journey with my Bambi-eyed girlfriend on Christmas Eve, all...

…having nothing better to do, meandered off to a coffee shop and sat facing each other for a couple of hours, neither of them talking much but each coming to the general conclusion that the...

They needed a reason why a little kid would commit murder, someone or something to point the finger at, and I think they were relieved when they hit upon horror movies as the culprit. But...

Who knew there were still people like that in this world, though? Everybody wants to talk about themselves, and everybody wants to hear everybody else’s story, so we take turns playing reporter and celebrity. ‘It...

That was with me for years–feeling I wasn’t myself. And I do think I wasn’t my real self then. Of course, I’m not sure there is such a thing as a real self. You could...

TV sounds are all the same; there’s no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.

Within two or three years of World War II’s end, starvation had been basically eliminated in Japan, and yet the Japanese had continued slaving away as if their lives depend on it. Why? To create...

But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you’ve worked towards, the life you’ve carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to...