Norwegian Wood

by Haruki Murakami

“Nobody likes being alone that much. I don’t go out of my way to make friends, that’s all. It just leads to disappointment.”

“That’s the kind of death that frightens me. The shadow of death slowly, slowly eats away at the region of life, and before you know it everything’s dark and you can’t see, and the people around you think of you as more dead than alive. I hate that. I couldn’t stand it.”

“The dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living.”

I tell myself, “OK, let’s make this day another good one.”

How many Sundays – how many hundreds of Sundays like this – lay ahead of me? “Quiet, peaceful, and lonely,” I said aloud to myself. On

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “Only arseholes do that.”