The Strange Library

by Haruki Murakami

And ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don’t know something, go to the library and look it up.

My parents always told us to "look it up" whenever we had a question of any kind.

Why do I act like this, agreeing when I really disagree, letting people force me to do things I don’t want to do?

“Because brains packed with knowledge are yummy, that’s why.

The sheep man has his world. I have mine. And you have yours, too. Am I right?

So just because I don’t exist in the sheep man’s world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t exist at all.

“Our worlds are all jumbled together—your world, my world, the sheep man’s world. Sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don’t. That’s what you mean, right?”

No matter what the situation may be, I still take pleasure in witnessing the joy of others.

“The world follows its own course,” he said. “Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”

any anxiety that is not especially anxious is, in the end, an anxiety hardly worth mentioning.

The tricky thing about mazes is that you don’t know if you’ve chosen the right path until the very end. If it turns out you were wrong, it’s usually too late to go back and start again. That’s the problem with mazes.