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risk is the spice of life.
It was the only concrete information he had about his mother, the one tenuous connection his mind could make with her. They were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past.
If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world—close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come
with his own eyes. I’m going to send him straight to the Southern Hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.
Its needle was as sharp and cold and pointed as a merciless idea.
he knew that bad premonitions have a far higher accuracy rate than good ones.
Wherever you go, whatever you do, you can never escape the pressure of this water. This memory defines who you are, shapes your life, and is trying to send you to a place that has been decided for you. You can writhe all you want, but you will never be able to escape from this power.
That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”
What Tengo would have to do, it seemed, was take a hard, honest look at the past while standing at the crossroads of the present. Then he could create a future, as though he were rewriting the past. It was the only way.
“Things can be seen better in the darkness,”
Life is so uncertain: you never know what could happen. One way to deal with that is to keep your pajamas washed.
And come to think of it, isn’t this world we live in itself like a gigantic model room? We come in, sit down, have a cup of tea, gaze out the window at the scenery, and when the time comes we say thank you and leave. All the furniture is fake. Even the moon hanging in the window may be made of paper.
That lonely, taciturn satellite.
Working in an unfamiliar place, away from your daily routine, was invigorating.
Like a merciful cloak, paralysis enveloped his body.
“Every day time moves forward one day’s worth.”
I’m not going to think of anything superfluous, Ushikawa decided. Be thick-skinned, have a hard shell around my heart, take one day at a time, go by the book. I’m just a machine. A capable, patient, unfeeling machine. A machine that draws in new time through one end, then spits out old time from the other end. It exists in order to exist. He
There was nothing north of here—only the chaos of nothingness.
Every person has his set routines when it comes to thinking and acting, and where there’s a routine, there’s a weak point.”
“People need routines. It’s like a theme in music. But it also restricts your thoughts and actions and limits your freedom. It structures your priorities and in some cases distorts your logic.
People all around the world had lost their lives, many of them in tragic ways—train wrecks, ferry boats sinking, plane crashes. A civil war went on with no end in sight, an assassination, a terrible ethnic massacre. Weather shifts had brought on drought, floods, famine. Aomame deeply sympathized with the people caught up in these tragedies and disasters, but even so, not a single thing had occurred that had a direct bearing on her.
To borrow Kumi’s phrase, as a “single leaf on a tree,” he turned off the light of consciousness, closed the door on any senses, and waited for the change of seasons.
People naturally pay their respects to the dead. The person had, after all, just accomplished the personal, profound feat of dying.
rephrase Tolstoy’s famous line, all happiness is alike, but each pain is painful in its own way.
