haruki-murakami

In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil," the man said. "Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevksy depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.

The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grows stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter

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 to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes, I'd go a week without talking to anybody.

Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It__ a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, __ur memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves.

Writing a novel is like having a dream.

Next she turned the gun upward and thrust the muzzle into her mouth. Now it was aimed directly at her cerebrum-- the gray labyrinth where consciousness resided.

Once you__e lost, you panic. You__e in total despair, not knowing what to do. I hate it when that happens. Sex can be a real pain that way, __ause when you get in the mood all you can think about is what__ right under your nose - that__ sex, all right.

Her cry was the saddest sound of orgasm that I had ever heard.

The better you were able to imagine what you wanted to imagine, the farther you could flee from reality.

Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.

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.

I think that my job is to observe people and the world, and not to judge them. I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions. I would like to leave everything wide open to all the possibilities in the world.

Even now, whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way. No homework to do, just a Sunday when you could do what you wanted. She always gave me this kick-back-and-relax, Sunday-morning kind of feeling.

Allowing ourselves to become pure point of view, we hang in midair over the city. What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective identity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, defecate.

I wrote letters in the classroom, I wrote letters at my desk at home with Seagull in my lap, I wrote letters at empty tables during my breaks at the Italian restaurant. It was as if I were writing letters to hold together the pieces of my crumbling life.

Even chance meetings are the result of karma_ Things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even in the smallest events there__ no such thing as coincidence.

I was living for one thing only, and that was to confirm my own lack of feeling.

...and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.Until that time, I had understood death as something entirely separate from and independent of life. The hand of death is bound to take us, I had felt, but until the day it reaches out for us, it leaves us alone. This had seemed to me the simple, logical truth. Life is here, death is over there. I am here, not over there.