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Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss.
“I am nothing,” Tengo said. “You are right. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.
“Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.”
“Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,”
He tried as hard as he could to think of other things, but in fact he was unable to think about anything at all. He was in chaos. Inside that chaos, time seemed to have come to a stop. But time never stopped. That was a theoretical impossibility. Perhaps it had simply lost its uniformity.
her face close to his. Her partially open lips now opened wide, and her soft, fragrant tongue entered his mouth, where it began a relentless search for unformed words, for a secret code engraved there. Tengo’s own tongue responded unconsciously to this movement and soon their tongues were like two young snakes in a spring meadow, newly wakened from their hibernation and hungrily
Tengo did as he was told. Inside his closed eyes he found a deep, gloomy space – so deep that it appeared to extend to the center of the earth.
Maybe we are nothing but skin cells as far as the world is concerned. If so, there’s nothing mysterious about somebody suddenly disappearing one day.
Would it have been possible to form such a relationship if murder had not been involved? Could we have formed such bonds of trust if I were not an outlaw? I doubt it.
A person’s life may be a lonely thing by nature, but it is not isolated. To that life other lives are linked,
Living one hectic day after another in the city, you tend to look down at the ground. You forget to even look at the night sky.
Whatever the composition of this new world might be, I surely have no choice but to accept it in silence. There’s no way to pick and choose. Even in the world that existed until now, there was no choice. It’s the same thing. And besides, he asked himself, even if I wanted to lodge a complaint, who is there for me to complain to?
I can’t afford to take responsibilities for others’ lives. It’s all I can do to bear the weight of my own life and my own loneliness.
die. If it comes to that, I’ll do it without hesitation. I can die smiling. But Aomame did not want to die ignorant, failing to grasp how things worked.
woman. He never had a positive feeling of love toward any of them, however. He just went with them and had sex with them. They filled each other’s emptiness. Strange as it may seem, he never once felt a strong emotional attraction to any of the women who had a strong emotional attraction to him.
