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Money isn’t like mushrooms in a forest – it doesn’t just pop up on its own, you know.
No matter how far you run. Distance might not solve anything.”
Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction. You change direction, but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no
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The facts and techniques or whatever they teach you in class isn’t going to be very useful in the real world, that’s for sure. Let’s face it, teachers are basically a bunch of morons. But you’ve got to remember this: you’re running away from home. You probably won’t have any chance to go to school any more, so like it or not you’d better absorb whatever you can while you’ve got the chance. Become like a sheet of blotting paper and soak it all in. Later on you can work out what to keep and what to unload.
“‘In travelling, a companion’, as the saying goes.”
Becoming a different person might be hard, but taking on a different name is child’s play.
I’m free, I remind myself. Like the clouds floating across the sky, I’m all by myself, totally free.
When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out from between their pages – a special odour of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers.
There are many things we only see clearly in retrospect.”
It’s easy to forget things you don’t need any more.
Whether you’re smart or dumb, can read or can’t, whether you’ve got a shadow or not, once the time comes, everybody passes on. You die and they cremate you.
But on the evening of the eighth day – as had to happen sooner or later – this simple, centripetal life is blown to bits.
We don’t have shells like turtles, nor wings like birds. We can’t burrow into the ground like moles or change colour like a chameleon.
“I just spend too much time lying in front of the TV and this is what happens – my head gets full of worthless facts.
“my point is: in this whole wide world the only person you can depend on is you.”
Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.
We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit about our minds.
Green’s the colour of a forest. Red’s the colour of blood.”
People soon get tired of things that aren’t boring, but not of what is boring.
being dumb and being crazy were different matters altogether.
“For every theory there has to be counter-evidence – otherwise science wouldn’t progress,”
In dreams begin responsibility.
I yank off my headphones and listen. Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.
“When a war starts people are forced to become soldiers. They carry guns and go to the front lines and have to kill soldiers on the other side. As many as they possibly can. Nobody cares whether you like killing other people or not. It’s just something you have to do. Otherwise you’re the one who gets killed.” Johnnie Walker pointed his index finger at Nakata’s chest. “Bang!” he said. “Human history in a nutshell.”
most choices we make in life are equally outrageous.”
Like flowers scattered in a storm, man’s life is one long farewell, as they say.”
Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what’s going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in,
“From my own experience, when someone is trying very hard to get something, they don’t. And when they’re running away from something as hard as they can, it usually catches up with them. I’m generalising, of course.”
“You’re right,” Oshima says. “That’s how stories happen – with a turning point, an unexpected twist.
There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes.
It’s as Tolstoy said: happiness is an allegory, unh...
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“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.”
Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there’s no end to it,” I say.
Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me.
most of the world was covered in darkness.
“You’re as big an eater as you are a sleeper!”
“My grandpa always said that asking questions is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking’s embarrassing for a lifetime.”
“I see trees, the sky and some clouds. Some birds on tree branches.” “Nothing out of the ordinary. Right?” “That’s right.” “But if you knew you might not be able to see it again tomorrow, everything would suddenly become special and precious, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.” “Have you ever thought about that?” “I have.” A surprised look comes over her face. “When?” “When I’m in love,” I tell her.
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.’”
The window is my heart’s window, the door my soul’s door. I lie there awake until dawn, staring at the empty chair.
“I’m appearing here in human form, but I’m neither god nor Buddha. My heart works differently from humans’ because I don’t have any feelings. That’s what it means.”
“Don’t ask me. God’s God. He’s everywhere, watching what we do, judging whether it’s good or bad.” “Sounds like a football referee.”
“Are the Japanese God and the foreign God relatives, or maybe enemies?”
“Listen, every object’s in flux. The earth, time, concepts, love, life, faith, justice, evil – they’re all fluid and in transition. They don’t stay in one form or in one place for ever. The whole universe is like some big FedEx box.”
The people who build high, strong fences are the ones who survive the best. You deny that reality only at the risk of being driven into the wilderness yourself …”
“The world would be a real mess if everybody was a genius.
‘Pointless thinking is worse than no thinking at all.’”
‘A life without once reading Hamlet is like a life spent in a coal mine.’”
“Listen – there’s no war that will end all wars,” Crow tells me. “War grows within war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.”
