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When all is said and done, it is my life.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing direction,”
On my fifteenth birthday I’ll run away from home, journey to a far-off town, and live in a corner of a small library.
In travelling, a companion, in life, compassion’,”
tanka and haiku
poet Taneda Santoka.
“The Castle, and The Trial,
In the Penal Colony’,”
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.
It’s all a question of imagination. Our responsibility begins with the power to imagine. It’s just as Yeats said: In dreams begin responsibility. Turn this on its head and you could say that where there’s no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. Just as we see with Eichmann.
You’re afraid of imagination. And even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the responsibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep, and dreams are a part of sleep. When you’re awake you can suppress imagination. But you can’t suppress dreams.
most choices we make in life are equally outrageous.”
Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.”
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.
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.”
proletariat,”
“The people who work hard, who earn their bread through the sweat of their brow, those are the proletariat.
“Things change every day, Mr Nakata.
With each new dawn it’s not the same world as the day before.
And you’re not the same person you ...
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we accept irony through a device called metaphor.
And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.”
Artists are those who can evade the verbose.”
“As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”
The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.’”
“A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts.
“Since I’m neither god nor Buddha, I don’t need to judge whether people are good or evil. Likewise I don’t have to act according to standards of good and evil.”
“Anyone who falls in love is searching for the missing pieces of themselves. So anyone who’s in love gets sad when they think of their lover.
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.’”
“It was the ancient Mesopotamians. They pulled out animal intestines – sometimes human intestines, I expect – and used the shape to predict the future. They admired the complex shape of intestines. So the prototype for labyrinths is, in a word, guts. Which means that the principle for the labyrinth is inside you. And that correlates to the labyrinth outside.”
“Memories warm you up from the inside. But they also tear you apart.”
if something did happen, it happened. Whether it’s right or wrong, I accept everything that happens, and that’s how I became the person
reminiscences,
You’re young, you’re tough. You’re adaptable. You can patch up your wounds, lift up your head and move on.
As I gaze at the vacant, birdless scene outside, I suddenly want to read a book – any book. As long as it’s shaped like a book and has printing, it’s fine by me. I just want to hold a book in my hands, turn the pages, scan the words with my eyes.
“Everyone does live together, and shares certain things.
There are certain simple, unspoken agreements in place,
The real response is something words can’t express.
“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live for ever in your own private library.”
Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it.
