1Q84 (1Q84, #1-3)

by Haruki Murakami

Things may look different to you than they did before. I’ve had that experience myself. But don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.”

“Well, you can try to rationalize it all you want, you can invent all kinds of noble-sounding pretexts, but in the end, a scam is a scam.”

It was her personal view that people who are overly choosy about the drinks they order in a bar tend to be sexually bland. She had no idea why this should be so.

Smart presidents usually became the target of assassins, so people with higher-than-average intelligence probably did their best to avoid being elected.

“You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, though, you’ll never go hungry.”

Tengo could not tell whether she lacked expression because she had no feelings or the feelings she had were unconnected to her expression. In any case, she was a mysterious girl.

“Is it possible to become friends with a butterfly?” “It is if you first become a part of nature. You suppress your presence as a human being, stay very still, and convince yourself that you are a tree or grass or a flower. It takes time, but once the butterfly lets its guard down, you can become friends quite naturally.”

They don’t leave any trace behind. It’s as if they’ve been absorbed by the air. They’re dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.”

If a life was to be measured by the color and variety of its episodes, his father’s life could be said to have been rich in its own way, perhaps.

Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone’s soul being blown to the far side of the world.

Drawing distinctions between religions and cults has always been a delicate business. There’s no hard and fast definition. Interpretation is everything. And where there is room for interpretation, there is always room for political persuasion.

What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?

“If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.”

Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers—passageways—for genes. They ride us into the ground like racehorses from generation to generation. Genes don’t think about what constitutes good or evil. They don’t care whether we are happy or unhappy. We’re just a means to an end for them. The only thing they think about is what is most efficient for them.”

Men who wield great violence at home against their wives and children are invariably people of weak character.

All I can do is live the life I have. I can’t trade it in for a new one. However strange and misshapen it might be, this is it for the gene carrier that is me.

I hope I can die that way—drink a little sherry on a summer afternoon, stretch out on a sofa, drop off to sleep, and never wake up.”