the wound that does not heal. the wound that may heal. the wound that should have healed. it grows wider, wider. what if the whole body becomes one big wound?
- all about lily chou-chou
in this light, it almost shines,
the morning sun is golden.
the bitter coffee's cold now, but still onto it i hold.
i bend and dip and sway but seeming so to never snap.
i never could quite figure if it's better when the sun's out.
"it sounds strange for a boy your age to use a word like damaged, though i must say i'm intrigued. what exactly do you mean by that?"
"i mean i'd change into something i shouldn't."
"as long as there's such as thing as time, everybody's damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later."
- kafka on the shore
"every one of us is losing something precious to us," he says. "lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. 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 room where we store those memories. a room like the stacks in this library. and to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. we have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. in other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."
- kafka on the shore
it is not the storm nor in the strife
we feel benumbed, and wish to be no more,
but in the after-silence on the shore,
when all is lost, except a little life.
- lord byron
"hey...if we keep doing this, just saying nothing, no matter what they do, think maybe we'll become things too?"
"i mean," i said, "we won't literally turn into flowers or desks, obviously...but we'll be acting just like things. so basically..."
"basically?" she said.
"it's like we're..." i started saying, but kojima cut me off.
"we're a lot like things already." she bit her lower lip and laughed.
- heaven
if anything has meaning, everything does. and if nothing has meaning, nothing does. that's what i've been saying. it's all the same. you, me, we're free to interpret the world differently. it's that simple. that's why you need to be strong. you have to overpower people so they can't come at you with their thoughts or rules or values.
- heaven
we know right from wrong. but we need to see, we need proof that all our pain and suffering will be rewarded... there's meaning in overcoming pain and suffering.
- heaven
i was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us.
- heaven
it was a hard life. that much has to be said, and it's one way of putting it. but as life passed by while shut up in here, i came to understand something. i realized that no matter how much we lost, or however badly we were treated, the fact is we are still human. all we can do is keep on going with our lives , even if we lose limbs, because this is not a fatal illness. in the midst of darkness and a struggle we had no hope of winning, i held on to this one thing — the fact of our humanity — and i was proud of it.
- sweet bean paste
he did not know when or why his fall had begun, but he sensed the seeds of it had always been in him, ever since he was small. it was nothing sudden. it was not failure to try and live an honest life — the result of leading an honest life was the wreckage of his days now. in short, sentaro suffered because he was who he was.
- sweet bean paste
if my view of the world disappears, then everything that i see disappears too. it's as simple as that.
and then i thought, what if this didn't apply to just me, what if there were no other human beings in this world? what about all the other human beings in this world? what about all the different forms of life that have the ability to be aware of the presence of others — what would happen if none of them existed either?
the answer is that this world in all its infinity would disappear.
you might think i'm deluded, but this idea changed me. i began to understand that we were born in order to see and listen to the world. and that's all this world wants of us.
- sweet bean paste
in answer, i can say that i know with certainty that life does have meaning.
- sweet bean paste
"she said that the only way for us to live is to be like the poets. that's what she said. if all you ever see is reality, you just want to die. the only way to get over barriers, she said, is to live in the spirit of already being over them."
- sweet bean paste
death was not the opposite of life. it was already here, within my being, it had always been here, and no struggle would permit me to forget that. when it took the seventeen-year-old kizuki that night in may, death took me as well.
i lived through the following spring at eighteen, with that knot of air in my chest, but i struggled all the while against becoming serious. becoming serious as not the same as approaching truth, i sensed, however vaguely. but death was a fact, a serious fact, no matter how you looked at it. stuck inside this suffocating contradiction, i went on endlessly spinning in circles. those were strange days, now that i look back at them. in the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
- norwegian wood
"for a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. from something like that or it doesn't begin at all."
- norwegian wood
"do you think you weren't loved enough?"
she tilted her head and looked at me. then she gave a sharp little nod. "somewhere between 'not enough' and 'not at all.' i was hungry for love. just once, i wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it—to be fed so much love i couldn't take it anymore. just once."
- norwegian wood
it was the usual noontime universtiy scene, but as i sat watching it with the renewed attention, i became aware of a certain fact. in his or her own way, each person 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 at the end of september, and because of that i felt a kind of loneliness that was new to me, as if I were the only one who was not truly part of the scene.
- norwegian wood
"what happens when people open their hearts?"
cigarette dangling from her lips, reiko clasped her hands together on the table. she was enjoying this. "they get better," she said. her ashes dropped onto the table, but she paid them no mind.
- norwegian wood