Kafka on the Shore

by Haruki Murakami

There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s as Tolstoy said: happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Story

“Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward any more. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”

The point

The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.’”

‘Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.’”