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It just happens to be the way I’m made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
The wind changes direction a little, and their cries become whispers.
“And you have no use for ‘ideals’, I suppose?” “None. Life doesn’t require ideals. It requires standards of action.”
“Girls are supposed to be a little more elegant when they put out their cigarettes. You did that like a lumberjack. You shouldn’t just cram it down in the ashtray but press it lightly around the edges of the ash. Then it doesn’t get all bent up. And girls are never supposed to blow smoke through their noses. And most girls wouldn’t talk about how they wore the same bra for three months when they’re eating alone with a man.” “I am a lumberjack,”
“You’re normal. I’ve got tons of things I don’t understand about myself. We’re both normal: ordinary.”
The scary thing is not being able to do that. When your feelings build up and harden and die inside, then you’re in big trouble.”
Lots of different people appear, and they all have their own situations and reasons and excuses, and each one is pursuing his or her own idea of justice or happiness. As a result, nobody can do anything. Obviously. I mean, it’s basically impossible for everybody’s justice to prevail or everybody’s happiness to triumph, so chaos takes over. And then what do you think happens? Simple – a god appears at the end and starts directing the traffic. ‘You go over there, and you come here, and you get together with her, and you just sit still for while.’ Like that. He’s a kind of fixer, and in the end
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“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only arseholes do that.”
If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.
Things like that happen all the time in this great big world of ours. It’s like taking a boat out on a beautiful lake on a beautiful day and thinking both the sky and the lake are beautiful. So stop eating yourself up. Things will go where they’re supposed to go if you just let them take their natural course. Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt. Life is like that.
You try too hard to make life fit your way of doing things. If you don’t want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life’s natural flow.
So stop what you’re doing this minute and get happy. Work at making yourself happy!
That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much.
My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a lifetime, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives.
“Seven songs,” said Reiko, sipping more wine and smoking another cigarette. “Those guys sure knew something about the sadness of life, and gentleness.” By “those guys” Reiko of course meant John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.

