Haruki Murakami

With jealousy, a parasite takes root in your heart. It becomes a cancer that eats away at your soul.

I think of human existence as being like a two-story house. On the rst oor people gather together to take their meals, watch television, and talk. e second oor contains private chambers, bedrooms where people go to read books, listen to music by themselves, and so on. en there is a basement;this is a special place, and there are a number of things stored here. We don__ use this room much in our daily life, but some- times we come in, vaguely hang around the place. en, my thought is that underneath that basement room is yet another basement room. is one has a very special door, very di - cult to gure out, and normally you can__ get in there__ome people never get in at all. . . . You go in, wander about in the darkness, and experience things there you wouldn__ see in the normal parts of the house. You connect with your past there, because you have entered into your own soul. But then you come back. If you stay over there for long you can never get back to reality.

Whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.

I do feel that I__e managed to make something I could maybe call my world_over time_little by little. And when I__ inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I__ a weak person, that I bruise easily, don__ you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing. It__ like a cardboard house: a puff of wind might carry it off somewhere.

Colors shone with exceptional clarity in the rain. The ground was a deep black, the pine branches a brilliant green, the people wrapped in yellow looking like special spirits that were allowed to wander over the earth on rainy mornings only.

Even so, there were times I saw freshness and beauty. I could smell the air, and I really loved rock 'n' roll. Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams. I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.

Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder's frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.

The Earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith justice, evil - they're all fluid and in transition. They don't stay in one form or in one place forever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.

For some reason all the middle-aged women he knew were very efficient.

I must be in love with this woman, Sumire realized with a start. Nomistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red; I'm in love. And thislove is about to carry me off somewhere. This current's toooverpowering; I don't have any choice. It may very well be a specialplace, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurkingthere, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I mightend up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only gowith the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever.

a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime

Being with her I feel a pain, like a frozen knife stuck in my chest. An awful pain, but the funny thing is I'm thankful for it. It's like that frozen pain and my very existence are one.

I don't have a thing," Tengo said, "except my soul.""Sounds like a job for Mephistopheles," she said.

I don't think I'd want Mickey Mouse pimping for me anyway.

All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it__ true__ll civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed to maintain a fenceless civilization until the seventeenth century. They__e dyed-in-the-wool free. They go where they want, when they want, doing what they want. Their lives are a literal journey. Walkabout is a perfect metaphor for their lives. When the English came and built fences to pen in their cattle, the Aborigines couldn__ fathom it. And, ignorant to the end of the principle at work, they were classified as dangerous and antisocial and were driven away, to the outback. So I want you to be careful. The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself.

Strictly speaking, it might not be a dream. It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where - at a special time and place - imagination had been set free.