Norwegian Wood

by Haruki Murakami

The better I got to know Nagasawa, the stranger he seemed. I had met a lot of strange people in my day, but none as strange as Nagasawa. He was a far more voracious reader than I, but he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least thirty years. “That’s the only kind of book I can trust,” he said. “It’s not that I don’t believe in contemporary literature,” he added, “but I don’t want to waste valuable time reading any book that has not had the baptism of time. Life is too short.”

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

When you’re surrounded by endless possibilities, one of the hardest things you can do is pass them up.

It was that kind of kiss. But as with all kisses, it was not without a certain element of danger.

I’m the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox. But that’s fine with me. I don’t mind at all. Better to be a first-class matchbox than a second-class match.

The coffee I had with it tasted like boiled printer’s ink.

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

If you’re in pitch blackness, all you can do is sit tight until your eyes get used to the dark.

That’s why you need to grab whatever chance you have for happiness where you find it, and not worry too much about other people. 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.

“Letters are just pieces of paper,” I said. “Burn them, and what stays in your heart will stay; keep them, and what vanishes will vanish.”