What You Are Looking for is in the Library

by Michiko Aoyama

You can decide things, but there’s no guarantee everything will go as planned. It’s just that—” Kiriyama’s voice breaks off and he pauses. “In a world where you don’t know what will happen next, I just do what I can right now.”

I am convinced that everything else that comes afterward is nowhere near as hard. If you can survive the ordeal of being born, you can get through anything.”

isn’t that funny? That each person should be chasing the tail of the person in front of them, when no one is coming first or last. In other words, when it comes to happiness nothing is better or worse—there is no definitive state.”

“Life is one revelation after another. Things don’t always go to plan, no matter what your circumstances. But the flip side is all the unexpected, wonderful things that you could never have imagined happening. Ultimately it’s all for the best that many things don’t turn out the way we hoped. Try not to think of upset plans

or schedules as personal failure or bad luck. If you can do that, then you can change, in your own se...

From big things to little, there are some things we simply cannot force to go to plan, no matter how hard we try.

Never swerving from a path is not necessarily a virtue—isn’t it better sometimes to be honest about what you really want?

“Things change, even if you want them to stay the same. At the same time, you can try to change, but you will still remain the same.”

“This didn’t just come to you. It happened because you did something for yourself. You took action and that caused things to change around you.”

“Not one single job I could name is absolutely secure. Everybody just does their best to hang in there, trying to balance it all.”

“There’s no guarantee of certainty in anything. But the flip side to there being no guarantee of security, is that there’s also no certainty that something is a dud.”