Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994)

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You're not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It's simple. It's your right.

Haruki Murakami
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.

Haruki Murakami
No matter what you tell me, no matter how legitimate your reasons, I can never just forget about you, I can never push the years we spent together out of my mind. I can't do it because it really happened, they are part of my life, and there is no way I can just erase them. That would be the same as erasing my own self.

Haruki Murakami
There's a special feeling you get on a veranda that you just can't get anywhere else.

Haruki Murakami
You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it's got nothing to do with you, but you're not really like that. In your own way, you're out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can't tell by looking at you.

Haruki Murakami
In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.

Haruki Murakami
This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

Haruki Murakami
Tell me, Doctor, are you afraid of death?" "I guess it depends on how you die.

Haruki Murakami
Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person.

Haruki Murakami
Some things, you know, if you say them, it makes them not true?

Haruki Murakami
Maybe she thought the garbage and rocks in your head were interesting. But finally, garbage is garbage and rocks are rocks.

Haruki Murakami
A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty—like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

Haruki Murakami
To know one's own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one's own face with one's own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one's reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.

Haruki Murakami
One last word of advice, though, Mr. Okada, though you may not want to hear this. There are things in this world it is better not to know about. Of course, those are the very things that people most want to know about. It's strange.

Haruki Murakami